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LIBRARY 

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SANTA    CRUZ 


THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 
AND  OTHER   ESSAYS 


'Books  by  Grander  Matthews 

These  Many  Years,  Recollections  of  a  New  Yorker 

BIOGRAPHIES 

Shakspere  as  a  Playwright 
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ESSAYS  AND  CRITICISMS 
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French  Dramatists  of  the  19th  Century 
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importance 

Aspects  of  Fiction,  and  other  Essays 
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The  American  of  the  Future,  and  other  Essays 
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On  Acting 

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The  Tocsin  of  Revolt  and  other  Essays 


Vignettes  of  Manhattan;  Outlines  in  Local  Color 


THE 

TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

AND  OTHER  ESSAYS 


BY 

BRANDER  MATTHEWS 

PROFESSOR  IN   COLUMBIA   UNIVERSITY 
MEMBER   OF  THE  AMERICAN  ACADEMY   OF  ARTS   AND   LETTERS 


NEW  YORK 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

1922 


Copyright  1922,  by 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 
Published  September,  1922 


TS 


IN  MEMORIAM 

AUSTIN   DOBSON 

Integer  vita  sderisque  purus 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


I  The  Tocsin  of  Revolt     .....  i 

1 1  The  Duty  of  the  Intellectuals    ...  21 

III  The  Dwelling  of  a  Day-Dream      .     .  41 

IV  Wlnat  Is  American  Literature?      .     .  63 
V  The  Centenary  of  a  Question    ...  79 

VI  American  Aphorisms     .     .     -.    • .    • .  97 

VII  A  Plea  for  the  Platitude     ,     ...  117 

VIII  On  the  Length  of  Cleopatra's  Nose      .  129 

IX  Concerning  Conversation     .     .     .     .  147 

X  The  Gentle  Art  of  Repartee       .     .     .  165 

XI  Cosmopolitan  Cookery 183 

XII  On  Working  Too  Much  and  Working 

Too  Fast    ..........  203 

XIII  The  Modernity  of  Moliere  .     .     .     .  217 

XIV  Theodore    Roosevelt    as    a    Man    of 

Letters  .     .     .     ,     .     .     .     .     ,  229 

XV  Memories  of  Mark  Twain  .     .     .     .  251 

Bibliographic  Note  ......  295 


I 

THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 


I 

THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 


TTTHEN  a  man  finds  himself  at  last  slowly 
VV  climbing  the  slopes  which  lead  to  the 
lonely  peak  of  three-score-and-ten  he  is  likely 
to  discover  that  his  views  and  his  aspirations 
are  not  in  accord  with  those  held  by  men  still 
living  leisurely  in  the  foothills  of  youth.  He 
sees  that  things  are  no  longer  what  they  were 
half-a-century  earlier  and  that  they  are  not 
now  tending  in  the  direction  to  which  they  then 
pointed.  If  he  is  wise,  he  warns  himself  against 
the  danger  of  becoming  a  mere  praiser  of  past 
times;  and  if  he  is  very  wise  he  makes  every 
effort  to  understand  and  to  appreciate  the  pres- 
ent and  not  to  dread  the  future.  He  may  even 
wonder  whether  he  is  not  suffering  from  a 
premature  hardening  of  the  arteries  of  sym- 
pathy. He  finds  himself  denounced  as  a  reac- 
tionary; and  he  doubts  whether  he  has  the 
courage  of  his  reactions. 

He  cannot  but  be  aware  that  his  case  has 
little  novelty,  since  a  generation  can  never  under- 
stand and  appreciate  the  generation  which  pre- 


THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

ceded  it  or  that  which  follows  it.  It  can  sym- 
pathize with  the  former  a  little  better  than  with 
the  latter,  because  we  can  know  our  parents 
more  intimately  than  we  can  ever  know  our 
children  after  they  have  once  attained  to  man's 
estate.  Moreover,  time  has  already  chosen  and 
consecrated  the  chief  figures  of  the  generation 
which  preceded  ours  and  the  effulgence  of  these 
outstanding  personalities  casts  into  the  shade 
the  failures  of  their  time,  whereas  in  the  genera- 
tion which  follows  ours  the  leaders  have  not 
been  elected  and  the  standard-bearers  have 
not  yet  been  able  to  manifest  themselves  fully 
and  to  separate  themselves  from  the  failures, 
the  freaks  and  the  fakes,  who  are  as  frequent 
and  as  insistently  visible  in  one  epoch  as  in 
another. 

The  sexagenarian  also  perceives  that  the  very 
young,  who  are  vociferous  in  indiscriminate  lau- 
dation of  their  contemporaries,  are  not  at  all 
anxious  that  he  should  understand  them  and 
appreciate  their  enthusiasms.  They  do  not 
greatly  care  for  his  sympathy — or  rather  they 
care  not  at  all.  In  the  inelastic  intolerance  and 
in  the  self-sufficient  complacency  of  youth  they 
refuse  to  waste  their  attention  on  him.  They 
have  no  use  for  him,  as  they  would  phrase  it; 
they  dismiss  him  as  a  back-number,  than  which 
there  can  be  no  object  more  despicable  in  their 


THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

eyes.  If  they  deemed  it  to  be  worth  while  they 
might  even  cry  out,  "Go  up,  thou  bald-head !" 
and  they  would  utter  this  insult  without  any 
fear  of  an  ursine  retort. 

They  are  self-centered  and  impatient  of  con- 
trol. They  are  inclined  to  boast  themselves  as 
the  foes  of  tradition  and  as  the  enemies  of  con- 
vention. They  claim  a  large  freedom  for  them- 
selves; and,  like  the  Puritans  of  old,  they  are 
prone  to  deny  a  like  freedom  to  others.  Their 
opinions  may  be  half-baked,  but  their  prejudices 
are  case-hardened.  They  see  no  reason  to  sus- 
pect that  there  may  be  interstices  in  their  om- 
niscience. They  feel  assured  in  their  juvenile 
energy  that  they  "know  it  all;"  and  they  are 
not  yet  old  enough  to  have  found  out  that  the 
man  who  "knows  it  all"  does  not  know  much, — 
does  not  indeed  know  himself,  which  is  the  be- 
ginning of  knowledge.  In  their  callow  imma- 
turity they  would  only  sniff  contemptuously  if 
they  happened  to  hear  the  oft  quoted  saying  of 
the  Master  of  Trinity,  that  "we  are  none  of  us 
infallible — not  even  the  youngest  of  us." 

They  may  dispute  among  themselves  inces- 
santly and  vehemently  and  bitterly;  but  they 
present  a  united  front  in  opposition  to  their 
elders  and  betters,  their  pastors  and  masters. 
And  these  elders,  if  they  have  acquired  a  little 
of  the  wisdom  which  is  the  privilege  of  age,  must 


THE   TOCSIN   OF  REVOLT 

recognize  that  this  is  natural  enough,  in  fact,  in- 
evitable, since  it  is  what  the  elders  did  them- 
selves when  they  had  the  fleeting  joy  of  being 
young  and  of  feeling  the  consciousness  of  their 
own  untested  powers.  It  is  only  by  action  and 
by  reaction  that  the  world  moves.  Every 
generation  is  entitled  to  prove  all  things,  even 
if  it  is  also  bound  to  hold  fast  to  that  which  is 
good.  Every  generation  transmits  to  its  suc- 
cessor the  heterogeny  of  traditions  and  of  con- 
ventions which  it  found  useful  and  which  it 
therefore  esteems  precious. 

Some  of  these  are  as  valuable  as  those  who 
established  them  believe;  but  others  will  not 
withstand  the  acid  test  on  the  touchstone  of 
time.  On-coming  youth  must  be  free  to  select 
the  traditions  which  are  permanently  useful 
and  the  conventions  which  need  to  be  preserved. 
It  is  free  also  to  make  traditions  of  its  own  and 
to  set  up  conventions  more  in  accord  with  its 
own  conditions.  Without  conventions  of  some 
sort  the  work  of  the  world  cannot  be  done,  as 
youth  always  finds  out  sooner  or  later,  when  it 
seeks  to  abolish  those  which  it  has  taken  over. 
There  is  veracity  as  well  as  piquancy  in  the 
statement  of  a  forgotten  biographer  that  his 
hero  "renounced  the  errors  of  the  Church  of 
Rome  and  adopted  those  of  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land." 


THE   TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

The  perfervid  Romanticists  of  France  in 
1830  devoted  themselves  to  disestablishing  the 
outworn  conventions  of  the  Classicist  drama. 
They  accomplished  their  purpose;  but  all  un- 
wittingly they  were  merely  substituting  the  con- 
ventions of  their  own  Romanticist  theater, 
which  the  later  Naturalists  denounced  as  pitiably 
invalid  as  those  which  the  Romanticists  had 
discarded  and  destroyed.  Already  are  we  be- 
ginning to  perceive  that  the  Naturalists  had 
perforce  to  employ  their  own  conventions, 
which  seem  to  us  now  as  unacceptable  as  those 
of  the  Classicists  and  of  the  Romanticists. 

It  is  recorded  that  in  the  fiercest  moment  of 
the  fight  of  the  Romanticists  against  the  Classi- 
cists, a  play  by  the  elder  Dumas  was  trium- 
phantly successful  at  the  Odeon;  and  in  the  ex- 
uberance of  their  delight  a  group  of  the  more 
ardent  spirits  joined  hands  and  danced  around 
the  bust  of  Racine  in  the  lobby  of  the  theater, 
crying,  "It's  all  up  with  you,  Racine!" — En- 
fonci  Racine!  And  for  the  moment  at  least 
they  seemed  to  be  justified  in  their  joy.  But 
within  a  score  of  years  the  genius  of  Rachel 
illuminated  the  masterpieces  of  both  Racine  and 
Corneille;  and  they  were  as  triumphantly  suc- 
cessful in  their  turn  as  the  play  of  Dumas  had 
been  at  its  first  performance.  Moreover,  when 
Racine  again  came  into  his  own  the  play  of 


THE   TOCSIN   OF  REVOLT 

Dumas  was  already  forgotten.  Perhaps  there 
is  a  lesson  here  for  the  intolerant  iconoclasts  of 
today.  It  may  be  that  some  of  the  reputations 
they  are  now  annihilating  will  reveal  themselves 
as  solidly  rooted  as  that  of  Racine. 

II 

THE  conflict  between  youth  and  age,  between 
conservatism  and  radicalism,  is  unending,  be- 
cause it  is  eternally  necessary  to  the  vitality  of 
the  several  arts,  which  need  to  be  reinvigorated 
generation  after  generation.  Youth  will  always 
lack  deference  for  age.  Inexperience  will  always 
try  to  throw  off  the  shackles  whereby  experience 
seeks  to  restrain  its  energy.  In  fact,  the  con- 
flict between  youth  and  age  is  an  ever  recurring 
skirmish  in  the  everlasting  battle  between  the 
individual  and  society  as  a  whole.  Ever  since 
man  came  down  from  his  tree  in  the  forest  pri- 
meval, ever  since  he  emerged  from  the  cave  which 
was  his  home  and  his  castle,  he  has  had  to  curb 
his  own  desires  for  the  benefit  of  the  community 
of  which  he  has  become  a  part.  His  family,  his 
clan,  his  tribe,  his  city,  his  state,  his  nation, 
even  mankind,  call  upon  him  continually  for 
self-restraint,  for  the  control  of  his  passions,  for 
self-sacrifice  in  view  of  a  larger  good.  He  must 
perforce  part  with  his  right  to  do  absolutely  as 
8 


THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

he  pleases,  or  there  would  be  immediate  anarchy. 
But  he  must  not  yield  all  of  it  or  too  much  of 
it  or  there  would  be  despotism,  either  auto- 
cratic or  aristocratic,  democratic  or  socialistic. 

It  is  upon  the  social  bond  that  the  solidity  of 
civilization  depends,  and  also  the  freedom  of 
the  individual  by  which  alone  is  civilization  ad- 
vanced. The  social  bond  must  be  neither  un- 
duly tightened  nor  unduly  relaxed.  Torque- 
mada  was  the  type  which  is  likely  to  be  evolved 
when  the  social  organization  assumes  to  itself 
a  total  control  of  the  individual;  and  Cain  was 
an  early  example  of  the  type  which  rejects  all 
restraint  and  asserts  a  man's  right  to  live  as  he 
himself  may  will,  regardless  of  the  rights  and  of 
the  lives  of  others.  The  consequences  of  exces- 
sive individualism  were  revealed  in  the  outrages 
of  the  closing  days  of  the  Paris  Commune;  and 
the  consequences  of  the  excessive  subordination 
of  the  subject  to  the  state  were  displayed  when 
Germans  (who  may  have  been  good  husbands 
and  devoted  parents)  sent  to  destruction  the 
wives  and  children  on  the  "Lusitania." 

These  are  extreme  manifestations  of  the  two 
hostile  principles  which  govern  and  always 
have  governed  and  always  must  govern  man, 
deciding  what  manner  of  life  he  shall  lead  and 
what  kind  of  a  creature  he  shall  be.  Both  prin- 
ciples are  necessary;  both  must  be  kept  active; 

9 


THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

and  neither  must  be  allowed  to  master  the  other. 
It  is  as  true  today  as  it  was  when  Horace  made 
the  assertion,  that  safety  lies  in  the  middle  of 
the  road.  The  path  to  progress  can  be  kept 
clear  only  when  the  opposing  forces  are  in  a 
state  of  unstable  equilibrium,  now  swerved  to 
one  side  by  the  onset  of  youth  and  now  swung 
to  the  other  by  the  sturdy  resistance  of  age. 

But  at  the  present  moment,  and  perhaps 
more  especially  in  our  own  country,  there  are 
signs  of  danger.  The  pendulum  is  not  at  rest, 
and  it  seems  to  be  swinging  a  little  too  far 
toward  overt  individualism.  If  this  is  the  fact, 
then  it  is  the  immediate  duty  of  the  elders  to 
point  out  the  peril  and  to  rally  to  the  support 
of  law  and  order.  Possibly,  indeed  very  prob- 
ably, what  we  perceive  may  be  only  a  tem- 
porary symptom,  due  to  the  excessive  exuber- 
ance of  youthful  energy.  The  menace  may 
pass  away  unfulfilled,  as  it  has  so  often  in  the 
earlier  centuries.  The  oncoming  generation 
may  awaken  in  time  to  a  full  recognition  of  the 
truth  contained  in  George  Eliot's  assertion  that 
"the  right  to  rebellion  is  the  right  to  seek  a 
higher  rule  and  not  to  wander  in  lawlessness." 
Yet  indisputably  there  is  today  much  that  is 
disquieting.  There  is  not  a  little  evidence  of  a 
tendency  on  the  part  of  the  young  to  refuse 
allegiance  to  the  social  bond,  to  reject  the  heri- 
10 


THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

tage  of  the  past,  to  renounce  tradition,  and  to 
insist  upon  the  insubordinate  manifestation  of 
the  caprices  and  vagaries  of  the  untamed  and 
undisciplined  individual.  We  can  only  trust 
that  the  evidence  is  not  as  significant  as  it  seems; 
for  that  way  madness  lies. 

Yet  in  life,  in  literature,  in  all  the  arts  we 
cannot  fail  to  perceive  an  unwonted  restlessness, 
an  unprecedented  distaste  for  balance  and  har- 
mony and  proportion,  accompanied  by  a  desire 
to  be  different,  by  a  seeking  for  novelty  for  its 
own  sake,  by  a  relish  for  eccentricity  and  freak- 
ishness,  by  a  refusal  to  profit  by  what  has  been 
bequeathed  to  us  by  the  past.  In  this  new  cen- 
tury we  have  been  called  upon  to  admire  paint- 
ing by  men  who  have  never  learnt  how  to  paint, 
dancing  by  women  who  have  never  learnt  how 
to  dance,  verse  by  persons  of  both  sexes  who 
have  never  acquired  the  elements  of  versifica- 
tion. The  tocsin  of  revolt  resounds  in  ethics 
as  wantonly  as  in  esthetics.  In  our  recent 
poetry,  in  our  recent  fiction,  in  our  recent  drama, 
there  is  an  exaltation  of  the  lawless  and  the 
illegal,  the  illicit  and  the  illegitimate.  The  red 
flag  has  been  unfurled  over  the  heads  of  a  mob 
of  fiery  youths,  who  are  insistent  in  proclaim- 
ing their  rights  and  who  seem  to  be  careless 
about  fulfilling  their  duties.  A  host  of  young 
fellows  are  pushing  forward,  with  their  atten- 
ii 


THE   TOCSIN   OF  REVOLT 

tion  fixed  only  on  themselves,  selfish,  egotistic 
and  boastful.  Apparently  they  are  possessed 
by  the  belief  that  they  can  make  a  clean  sweep 
of  the  past  and  that  they  can  reach  to  the  sky 
and  touch  the  stars  without  standing  on  the 
shoulders  of  their  predecessors  and  without 
profiting  by  the  achievements  of  these  prede- 
cessors. 

Ill 

PROBABLY  this  restless  movement  will  soon 
spend  its  force  as  those  who  are  directing  it 
grow  older  and  wiser.  Probably  the  most  it 
can  achieve  will  be  only  the  destruction  of  in- 
heritances no  longer  valuable.  Yet  it  may  be 
as  well  for  us  to  remind  ourselves  that  there  has 
never  been  any  solid  advance  in  any  of  the  arts 
by  any  generation  except  when  that  generation 
began  where  the  immediately  preceding  genera- 
tion left  off.  The  future  must  build  upon  the 
past.  Nothing  is  more  hopelessly  futile  than 
the  attempt  to  start  fresh.  To  believe  that 
this  can  ever  be  done  is  to  ignore  or  to  be  igno- 
rant of  history.  Progress  can  be  made,  not  by 
disregarding  what  has  already  been  discovered 
and  invented,  but  only  by  knowing  all  these 
things,  by  absorbing  them,  by  assimilating 
them,  by  combining  them,  if  need  be,  and  by 
adding  discoveries  and  new  inventions. 
12 


THE   TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

There  is  a  phrase  in  constant  use  among  the 
electrical  engineers  which  is  pertinent  and  illu- 
minating. They  are  in  the  habit  of  speaking 
of  "the  present  state  of  the  art/'  asserting  that 
certain  improvements  greatly  to  be  wished  for 
are  not  possible  in  the  present  state  of  the  art. 
And  it  is  with  the  present  state  of  the  art  as  a 
starting-point  that  they  prepare  for  the  desired 
advance.  In  other  words,  before  attempting 
to  go  forward,  they  make  sure  that  they  have 
mastered  the  technic  of  their  profession  and 
that  they  know  all  that  has  been  done  and  know 
how  it  has  been  done,  so  that  they  can  prepare 
themselves  to  do  something  which  has  never 
been  done. 

Not  a  few  of  those  who  are  in  the  forefront  of 
the  modern  movement  are  apparently  full  of 
contempt  for  the  present  state  of  the  special  art 
they  propose  to  practise.  They  affect  to  despise 
technic,  altho  every  great  artist  has  always  de- 
lighted in  technical  accomplishment.  We  find  in 
the  work  of  many  of  these  professed  innovators 
an  amazing  slovenliness  of  craftsmanship,  an 
appalling  disdain  for  artistry  for  its  own  sake. 
If  they  were  more  familiar  with  the  work  of  the 
men  who  have  led  the  artistic  revolutions  of  the 
past,  they  would  know  that  these  leaders  always 
began  by  being  abreast  of  the  state  of  the  art 
and  by  equipping  themselves  with  all  the  varied 


THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

and  delicate  tools  devised  by  the  craftsmen  who 
had  gone  before. 

Victor  Hugo,  for  example,  revolutionized 
French  poetry.  He  was  profoundly  dissatisfied 
with  the  restrictions  then  imposed  upon  the 
lyric  and  the  drama  by  the  rigidity  of  the  ac- 
cepted rules.  But  he  was  successful  in  his  on- 
slaught on  an  enfeebled  tradition  and  on  a  false 
convention  only  because  he  was  a  supreme 
master  of  technic,  dextrous  beyond  all  the  men 
of  his  time,  possessed  of  all  the  secrets  of  the  art 
of  verse.  Ibsen,  again,  was  a  most  potent  force; 
he  was  responsible  for  a  revival  of  intellectual 
interest  in  the  drama;  and  he  too  was  the  most 
adroit  of  technicians,  the  most  consummate  of 
craftsmen,  rinding  his  profit  in  the  work  of  the 
ingenious  French  playwrights  of  the  middle  of 
the  nineteenth  century.  No  doubt,  he  bettered 
what  he  had  learned  from  these  Frenchmen,  but 
he  had  to  learn  it,  first  of  all;  he  had  to  acquaint 
himself  with  the  state  of  the  art  as  it  was  when 
he  began  to  compose  his  series  of  social  dramas. 
So  closely  does  he  follow  in  the  footsteps  of  the 
French  that  the  ' League  of  Youth'  and  the 
*  Pillars  of  Society'  and  even  the  first  two  acts 
of  'A  Doll's  House'  might  have  been  written 
by  a  Scandinavian  Sardou. 

To  many  Americans,  especially  to  the  un- 
travelled,  the  Russian  ballet  brought  a  new 


THE   TOCSIN   OF  REVOLT 

revelation  of  beauty.  It  was  hailed  as  an  abso- 
lute novelty,  whereas  in  fact  it  represented  only 
the  latest  stage  of  a  long  development  of  the 
pantomimic  dance,  first  elaborated  by  Noverre 
in  Paris  in  the  eighteenth  century  and  in  the 
next  hundred  years  carried  from  Paris  to  Milan 
and  Naples,  to  Vienna  and  finally  to  Petrograd. 
The  dancing  of  Pavlova  and  of  Mordkin  was 
freshly  individual;  but  only  by  that  individual- 
ity did  it  differ  from  the  dancing  of  Taglioni  and 
Vestris.  The  mood  might  be  Russian,  but  the 
method  was  Franco-Italian.  One  of  the  grace- 
less pretenders  who  posture  to  symphonies  and 
interpret  poems  by  gesture  alone  once  curtly 
dismissed  Pavlova's  exquisite  grace  as  "toe- 
dancing."  This  was  a  characteristic  exhibition 
of  egotistic  ignorance.  The  gracile  Russian  can 
dance  on  her  toes,  of  course,  because  the  ability 
to  do  that  is  an  essential  part  of  the  necessary 
technic.  But  not  because  she  can  dance  on  her 
toes  is  it  that  Pavlova  is  a  haunting  vision  of 
floating  etheriality. 

In  music,  that  most  modern  of  the  moderns, 
Debussy,  made  himself  intimate  with  all  the 
intricacies  of  harmony  before  he  ventured  upon 
his  own  disquieting  innovations.  In  sculpture, 
that  most  modern  of  the  moderns,  Rodin,  proved 
himself  in  his  early  bust  of  Puvis  de  Chavannes  to 
be  capable  of  a  delicate  refinement  of  modelling 

15 


THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

recalling  that  of  the  masters  of  the  Italian  Renas- 
cence; and  his  later  works,  which  may  appear  to 
the  careless  observer  as  uncouthly  hewn,  dis- 
close to  the  careful  expert  "the  unconscious 
skill  of  the  modelling  hand" — to  use  George 
Eliot's  apt  phrase.  And  finally,  in  stage-dec- 
oration, that  most  modern  of  the  moderns, 
Joseph  Urban,  had  long  years  of  practice  as  an 
architect  making  himself  familiar  with  all  the 
principles  of  that  art  and  so  prepared  himself 
arduously  for  the  task  that  he  was  later  to  un- 
dertake. 

IV 

BEFORE  they  were  ready  to  risk  themselves 
in  the  quest  for  novelty  for  a  purely  personal 
expression,  Hugo  and  Ibsen,  Debussy,  Rodin 
and  Urban  made  sure  that  they  were  abreast  of 
the  state  of  the  art.  They  had  subjected  them- 
selves to  discipline  and  submitted  to  training. 
Only  because  they  did  this  in  their  youth  were 
they  able  in  their  maturity  to  express  them- 
selves adequately  and  interestingly  and  to  ad- 
vance the  state  of  the  art.  And  this  discipline 
and  this  training  is  just  what  a  crowd  of  clever 
youngsters  now  affect  to  despise,  possibly  from 
sheer  laziness,  but  more  probably  from  a  sincere 
conviction  that  these  things  are  no  longer  neces- 
sary and  indeed  no  longer  useful.  They  seem  to 
believe  honestly  that  the  future  masterpieces  of 
16 


THE   TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

literature  and  of  art  are  to  be  evolved  out  of 
their  inner  consciousness  by  some  sort  of  spon- 
taneous generation.  They  have  persuaded 
themselves  that  art  is  as  easy  as  it  looks  and 
that  a  mastery  of  its  processes  is  the  gift  of  God, 
freely  granted  to  those  who  are  conscious  of  pos- 
sessing the  artistic  temperament. 

In  fact,  this  belief  is  not  infrequently  ex- 
pressed with  unsuspected  frankness.  One  of 
the  most  distinguished  of  American  mural 
painters  was  recently  advising  an  ambitious 
young  fellow  from  the  West,  who  listened  to  the 
counsel  courteously  and  rejected  it  absolutely. 
"No,"  he  said,  "the  School  of  Rome  is  not  for 
me,  and  these  art  schools  of  New  York  are  not 
for  me.  I  have  ideas  of  my  own;  I  consider  my 
temperament  my  most  valuable  asset, — and  I'm 
not  going  to  submit  to  its  being  interfered  with 
by  any  rules!" 

It  would  be  futile,  of  course,  to  call  the  atten- 
tion of  these  self-centered  youngsters  to  Goethe's 
pungent  epigram  which  Austin  Dobson  aptly 
turned  into  English: 

Saith  one:  "To  no  school  I  belong; 
No  living  Master  leads  me  wrong; 
Nor  do  I,  for  the  things  I  know, 
A  debt  to  any  dead  man  owe." 

Which  means,  in  phrasing  less  polite: 

"I  am  a  Fool  in  my  own  Right." 
17 


THE  TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

Is  this  attitude  the  result  of  impatience,  or  of 
laziness,  or  of  inordinate  conceit?  One  acute 
observer  of  contemporary  conditions  has  sug- 
gested that  it  is  due  to  the  leveling  tendency  of 
modern  life,  "so  that  men  strive  frantically  to 
raise  themselves  above  the  level  by  doing  some- 
thing strange,  startling,  exaggerated,  whimsical. 
To  study  the  laws  and  methods  of  literature  or 
the  arts,  to  saturate  themselves  with  traditions, 
bores  them,  so  they  resort  to  sensationalism,  and 
try  to  palm  it  off  for  originality.  ...  Of  course, 
any  of  them  could  achieve  a  similar  originality 
by  coming  naked  up  Fifth  Avenue."  Indeed, 
there  are  recent  poems  and  recent  pictures  which 
are  instantly  recognizable  as  indecent  exposures 
of  the  nudity  of  their  producers7  minds. 

It  is  not  difficult  to  diagnose  this  green- 
sickness of  the  arts  but  it  is  hard  to  prescribe  any 
remedy.  The  tendency  to  anarchy,  to  unedu- 
cated individualism,  may  be  evident  in  all  arts 
and  in  all  countries;  but  none  the  less  is  it  cer- 
tain to  subside,  because  if  it  persisted  too  long 
the  several  arts  would  cease  to  be, — and  that  is 
inconceivable,  since  man  needs  them  all  and  has 
developed  them  in  response  to  his  needs.  The 
malady  must  run  its  course;  and  in  spite  of  the 
expectant  treatment  of  the  mature  practitioners 
the  young  patients  will  come  out  of  the  attack 
temporarily  enfeebled.  Perhaps  the  fever  will 
18 


THE   TOCSIN  OF  REVOLT 

soon  be  shaken  off  by  the  stronger  and  the 
soberer,  better  able  to  resist  the  infection. 

When  Richard  Wagner,  who  was  once  de- 
nounced as  a  dangerous  innovator,  was  a  youth- 
ful student,  he  did  not  like  the  drudgery  of 
counterpoint  But  his  instructor,  Theodore 
Weinlig,  made  him  work  hard  at  it  for  six 
months,  dismissing  him  then  with  the  remark, 
"What  you  have  learnt  is  freedom!"  And  it 
was  this  laboriously  acquired  liberty  within  the 
law  which  enabled  Wagner  in  the  prelude  to  the 
*  Master  Singers'  to  work  simultaneously  in 
counterpoint  five  of  his  leading  motives. 

Once  again  is  it  helpful  to  quote  (in  Austin 
Dobson's  rendering,)  Theophile  Gau tier's  'Ars 
Victrix': 

Yes;  when  the  ways  oppose — 
When  the  hard  means  rebel, 

Fairer  the  work  outgrows, — • 
More  potent  far  the  spell. 

0  Poet,  then,  forbear 

The  loosely-sandalled  verse, 
Choose  rather  thou  to  wear 

The  buskin — strait  and  terse; 


Leave  to  the  tyro's  hand 

The  limp  and  shapeless  style; 

See  that  thy  form  demand 
The  labor  of  the  file. 

19 


THE   TOCSIN   OF  REVOLT 

Sooner  or  later  the  tocsin  of  revolt  will  cease 
its  clangor.  Sooner  or  later  the  young  men  of 
promise  will  furl  the  red  flag.  They  will  refuse 
to  fellowship  with  the  fakers.  They  will  tire  of 
facile  eccentricity  and  of  lazy  freakishness,  of 
unprofitable  sensationalism  and  of  undisciplined 
individualism.  They  will  again  seek  the  aid  of 
tradition  and  they  will  toil  to  master  the  secrets 
of  technic.  They  will  recognize  the  validity  of 
Theodore  Roosevelt's  shrewd  saying:  " Second- 
rate  work  is  always  second-rate — even  if  it  is 
badly  done."  Then  and  then  only  will  they  dis- 
cover the  stern  and  abiding  joy  of  difficulty  reso- 
lutely grappled  with  and  ultimately  conquered. 

(1917.) 


20 


II 

THE  DUTY  OF  THE   INTELLECTUALS 


II 

THE  DUTY  OF  THE  INTELLECTUALS 


THE  French,  always  keen  in  classification  and 
apt  in  nomenclature,  have  devised  a  special 
designation  for  the  men  of  light  and  leading, 
who  are  indisputably  influential  in  the  commu- 
nity yet  who  rarely  descend  into  the  arena  of 
practical  politics.  These  artists  and  these  phi- 
losophers, these  men  of  letters  and  these  men  of 
science,  figures  of  national  importance,  the 
French  are  wont  to  group  together  and  to  call 
them  collectively  The  Intellectuals.  Corre- 
sponding groups  exist  in  every  other  country,  of 
course,  even  if  their  solidarity  and  their  signifi- 
cance is  nowhere  else  as  fully  recognized  as  it  is 
in  France;  and  in  every  people  these  Intellec- 
tuals may  be  summoned  for  service  to  the  state; 
they  may  have  imposed  upon  them  suddenly  a 
duty  not  possible  of  performance  by  any  other 
group. 

When  Matthew  Arnold  paid  his  first  visit  to 
the  United  States,  now  thirty-five  years  ago,  he 
prepared  an  opening  lecture  specially  for  us, 

23 


THE  DUTY   OF   THE   INTELLECTUALS 

choosing  for  it  a  topic  from  which  he  could  de- 
duce a  moral  of  immediate  and  permanent  im- 
portance to  those  he  was  directly  addressing. 
He  called  his  discourse,  "Numbers,  or  the  Rem- 
nant" ;  and  with  characteristic  courage  he  warned 
us  that  the  voice  of  the  people  is  not  to  be  re- 
ceived everywhere  and  always  as  the  voice  of 
God.  He  insisted  on  the  duty  laid  upon  the 
more  thoughtful  and  the  better  informed  to  com- 
bat any  tendency  toward  a  blind  yielding  to  the 
pressure  of  the  more  ignorant  majority.  He 
dwelt  upon  the  supreme  significance  of  a  saving 
remnant  of  the  most  intelligent  and  of  the  most 
upright,  ready  always  to  resist  the  momentary 
unanimity  of  the  mob  and  capable  of  holding 
fast  to  ancient  landmarks  no  matter  how  high 
and  how  fierce  the  tide  which  might  seem  to  be 
about  to  batter  them  down  and  to  sweep  them 
away. 

Of  course,  Arnold  was  far  too  shrewd  to  be 
tempted  to  the  opposite  extreme  and  to  hold 
with  Ibsen  that  the  majority  is  always  in  the 
wrong.  The  persuasive  British  critic  had  de- 
rived from  his  study  of  French  life  and  French 
literature  not  a  little  of  the  social  instinct  of  the 
French,  ever  a  corrective  of  the  excessive  in- 
dividualism which  invalidates  the  preaching  of 
the  stern  and  egotistic  Scandinavian  dramatist. 
The  majority  is  not  always  in  the  wrong,  and  the 
24 


THE  DUTY  OF  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

minority  is  not  always  in  the  right.  Yet  the 
multitude  is  inclined  to  have  fleeting  fits  of  hys- 
teria; and  it  is  then  in  danger  of  rushing  down  a 
steep  place  and  casting  itself  into  the  sea,  unless 
it  is  recalled  to  its  self-possession  by  the  voice  of 
the  few  who  have  kept  their  self-control.  Ar- 
nold quoted  a  pertinent  passage  from  Plato,  de- 
scribing the  plight  of  a  people  which  is  deprived 
of  this  element  of  stability: 

There  is  but  a  very  small  remnant  of  honest  follow- 
ers of  wisdom,  and  they  are  those  who  have  tasted  how 
sweet  and  blessed  a  possession  is  wisdom,  and  who  can 
fully  see,  moreover,  the  madness  of  the  multitude,  and 
that  there  is  no  one,  we  may  say,  whose  action  in  pub- 
lic matters  is  sound,  and  no  ally  for  whosoever  would 
help  the  just, — what  are  they  to  do? 

The  same  point  was  more  recently  made,  and 
with  a  more  direct  reference  to  conditions  often 
occurring  in  a  modern  democracy,  by  Professor 
George  Burton  Adams  in  his  Phi  Beta  Kappa 
address  at  Columbia  University  in  the  spring  of 
1917.  "For  it  often  happens  in  the  history  of 
democracies  that  the  man  who  stands  in  the 
place  of  leadership,  whose  duty  it  is  from  his 
position  to  point  out  the  way  upon  which  the 
nation  ought  to  enter,  chooses  rather  to  wait 
until  the  general  opinion  makes  itself  known. 
When  this  happens  the  duty  falls  with  more  than 

25 


THE  DUTY  OF  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

usual  weight  upon  those  men  who  can  lead  the 
opinion  of  their  communities;  and  in  every  com- 
munity like  this,  it  is  the  privilege  of  the  edu- 
cated man." 

Sometimes  "the  man  who  stands  in  the  place 
of  leadership/'  that  is  to  say,  the  chief  magis- 
trate of  the  republic,  is  truly  a  leader,  stalwart 
in  maintaining  his  own  convictions  and  resolute 
in  resisting  the  pressure  of  public  opinion,  when 
he  is  convinced  that  it  is  being  temporarily  ex- 
erted in  the  wrong  direction.  In  our  own  his- 
tory we  have  seen  many  instances  of  this  manly 
courage,  which  risked  immediate  unpopularity  to 
secure  an  ultimate  result  beneficial  to  the  whole 
community.  Washington  refused  to  yield  to  the 
clamor  which  insisted  that  we  should  again  go  to 
war  with  Great  Britain;  Grant  vetoed  the  in- 
flation bill;  and  Cleveland  withstood  the  ap- 
parently irresistible  demand  for  free  silver. 

But  there  have  been  other  moments  in  our 
history  when  the  political  leader  of  the  hour  has 
waited  until  general  opinion  made  itself  known 
and  when  he  has  then  made  himself  the  mouth- 
piece and  the  instrument  of  the  majority  even 
tho  he  did  not  himself  share  its  opinions.  Of 
course,  this  is  an  abdication  of  the  privilege  of 
leadership;  and  it  reduces  the  politician  conform- 
ing to  this  practise  to  the  contemptible  position 
of  the  fabled  French  demagog  who  was  warned 
26 


THE  DUTY   OF   THE   INTELLECTUALS 

against  following  the  mob  and  who  explained  with 
frank  ingenuousness  "But  I  must  follow  them, — 
I  am  their  leader !" 

II 

WHEN  the  foremost  officer  in  the  state  lacks 
the  vision  and  the  courage  to  stand  up  in  behalf 
of  the  eternal  principles  endangered  for  the  mo- 
ment by  the  misdirected  enthusiasm  of  the  ma- 
jority, then,  as  Professor  Adams  says,  the  duty 
of  the  resisting  the  evil  desire  of  the  hours,  falls 
with  more  than  usual  weight  upon  those  men 
who  have  it  in  them  to  be  truly  leaders,  the  men 
of  education,  of  intellect,  of  intelligence.  We  are 
often  told  that  a  democracy  like  ours  has  no  re- 
spect for  what  must  be  termed  the  aristocracy  of 
intellect  and  that  this  disrespect  is  proved  by  the 
absence  of  the  members  of  this  mentally  superior 
group  from  the  higher  places  in  the  government 
of  the  city,  of  the  state  and  of  the  nation.  There 
is  no  denying  that  our  Intellectuals  have  not  of- 
ten held  high  position  in  the  public  service.  But 
this  is  not  a  condition  peculiar  to  the  United 
States  in  the  twentieth  century. 

Only  very  rarely  in  any  period  and  in  any 
place  have  the  foremost  intellects  of  that  time 
and  of  that  country  been  engaged  in  the  actual 
work  of  administration  and  legislation.  It  is 
true  that  Goethe  did  for  a  few  years  have  a  large 
27 


THE  DUTY  OF  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

share  in  the  ruling  of  little  Weimar.  It  is 
true  also  that  Caesar,  Frederick  and  Napoleon, 
Richelieu  and  Cromwell,  Lincoln  and  Bismarck 
were  all  of  them  men  of  exceptional  acumen  and 
imagination;  but  it  is  not  as  intellectual  chiefs 
that  we  remember  them.  Statesmen,  however 
successful,  are  not  likely  to  be  advanced  think- 
ers, pioneers  of  speculative  inquiry;  and  they 
would  not  have  been  as  successful  in  their  own 
special  field  if  they  had  been  prone  to  the  specu- 
lative inquiries  which  would  have  separated  them 
in  sympathy  from  the  main  body  of  the  plain 
people  whom  it  was  their  first  duty  to  guide. 
As  President  Eliot  once  put  it  pithily,  "political 
leaders  are  very  seldom  leaders  of  thought;  they 
are  generally  trying  to  induce  masses  of  men  to 
act  on  principles  thought  out  long  before";  and 
"their  skill  is  in  the  selection  of  practicable  ap- 
proximations to  their  ideal;  their  arts  are  arts  of 
exposition  and  persuasion;  their  honor  comes 
from  fidelity  under  trying  circumstances  to  fa- 
miliar principles." 

It  is  when  these  political  leaders  are  derelict  to 
duty  and  stain  their  hands  by  lack  of  fidelity  to 
familiar  principles  that  the  intellectual  aristoc- 
racy, the  philosophers  and  the  educators,  the 
men  of  letters  and  the  men  of  science  are  under 
obligation  to  abandon  their  several  studies  for 
the  moment  and  to  testify  to  the  permanence  of 
28 


THE  DUTY  OF  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

the  familiar  principles  which  are  attacked  by  the 
majority  and  betrayed  by  its  official  leaders.  It 
is  then  their  duty  to  try  to  resist  and  to  stabilize 
public  opinion,  as  on  other  occasions  and  under 
other  circumstances  it  is  their  duty  to  stimulate 
and  to  encourage  it.  A  country  is  fortunate  when 
the  members  of  its  intellectual  aristocracy  are 
conscious  of  this  obligation  and  alive  to  the 
privilege  it  confers;  and  a  country  is  singularly 
unfortunate  when  those  who  ought  to  be  its 
chief  spirits  renounce  their  chieftainship,  step 
down  from  their  lofty  isolation,  and  throw  in 
their  lot  with  the  mob. 

Even  when  there  is  no  emotional  excitement  in 
public  affairs,  the  more  calmly  thinking  class  has 
the  special  function  of  reacting  against  the  nat- 
ural national  self-glorification, — which  may  be 
useful,  when  kept  strictly  within  bounds,  but 
which  is  dangerous,  not  to  say  deadly,  when  al- 
lowed to  run  riot.  Every  powerful  and  expand- 
ing people  has  a  tendency  to  exalt  itself,  and 
to  hold  itself  as  indisputably  superior  to  all  its 
rivals.  Sometimes  this  belief  is  so  ingrained  and 
deep-rooted  and  long-standing  that  it  feels  no 
need  for  overt  expression;  it  expects  to  be  taken 
for  granted  even  if  unstated;  and  something  of 
this  attitude  might  have  been  seen  toward  the 
end  of  the  nineteenth  century  both  in  France  and 
in  England.  Sometimes  it  is  a  sudden  and  vio- 
29 


THE  DUTY  OF  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

lent  reaction  from  previous  self-depreciation;  it 
is  the  swift  result  of  a  new  national  conscious- 
ness; and  then  it  is  likely  to  demand  vehement 
proclamation,  as  tho  it  were  not  quite  sure  of 
itself  and  needed  to  be  convinced  by  the  em- 
phatic assertion  of  its  supremacy;  and  something 
of  this  attitude  was  to  be  seen  in  Germany  in  the 
early  years  of  the  twentieth  century.  Sometimes 
it  was  due  not  so  much  to  actual  achievement 
as  to  a  sublime  belief  in  the  possible  accom- 
plishment of  the  future;  and  something  of  this 
attitude  was  observable  in  the  boastfulness  not 
infrequently  heard  in  the  United  States  in  the 
first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century. 

Whatever  the  cause  of  this  attitude  it  calls 
for  constant  and  vigilant  self-criticism.  Lowell, 
both  in  the  verse  of  a  '  Fable  for  Critics'  and  in 
the  prose  of  his  essays,  shot  shafts  of  pungent  wit 
into  the  inflated  figure  of  Brother  Jonathan  dis- 
tended by  self -puffery;  and  Matthew  Arnold 
was  untiring  in  protest  against  Macaulay's  com- 
placent assumption  of  British  supremacy  in 
literature.  Of  course,  every  great  people  pos- 
sesses certain  qualities  in  greater  abundance  than 
any  of  its  rivals;  and  equally  of  course  there  are 
other  qualities  in  which  it  is  more  or  less  de- 
ficient. Arnold,  again,  deserved  well  of  his 
countrymen  for  the  insistence  with  which  he 
called  attention  to  the  French  virtues  of  order 
and  organization,  harmony  and  proportion, — 

3° 


THE  DUTY  OF  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

qualities  which  he  urged  his  more  energetically 
imaginative  countrymen  to  acquire  from  their 
hereditary  rivals. 

Ill 

IT  is  however  not  so  much  in  the  hours  of 
calm  as  in  the  days  of  national  excitement  that 
the  influence  of  the  Intellectuals  is  most  useful. 
When  a  people  is  about  to  be  swept  off  its  feet 
by  hysteric  emotionalism  then  there  is  a  burden 
laid  upon  "the  honest  followers  of  wisdom  and 
those  who  have  tasted  how  sweet  and  blessed 
a  possession  is  wisdom,  and  who  can  see  moreover 
the  madness  of  the  multitude."  A  country  is 
then  fortunate  indeed  if  its  Intellectuals  measure 
up  to  their  duty;  and  it  is  sadly  bereft  if  they  sink 
themselves  in  the  mad  multitude. 

Here  in  the  United  States  in  the  dark  years 
after  the  passage  of  the  Fugitive  Slave  Law,  our 
Intellectuals  rose  to  the  occasion  and  were  in- 
sistent in  asserting  the  iniquity  of  slavery  and 
the  plain  right  of  every  man  to  own  himself. 
The  influence  of  the  lyrics  of  Whittier  and  of 
Lowell  was  direct;  but  it  was  probably  not  more 
potent  than  the  indirect  influence  of  Emerson's 
individualistic  philosophy. 

In  Great  Britain  in  the  eighteenth  century  the 
Intellectuals — always  with  the  exception  of  Dr. 
Johnson, — were  almost  united  in  opposing  the 
folly  of  the  American  policy  of  George  III.  And 


THE  DUTY  OF   THE  INTELLECTUALS 

in  the  nineteenth  century  many  of  the  Intellec- 
tuals were  not  in  favor  of  the  Boer  War;  and  the 
stand  they  then  took  was  one  factor  in  bringing 
about  a  final  settlement,  so  liberal  in  its  terms 
to  the  defeated  party  that  it  assured  the  lasting 
unity  of  the  new  South  African  commonwealth. 
But  it  is  in  France  that  the  Intellectuals  have 
had  occasion  to  exert  themselves  most  often  and 
most  effectively.  France  is  fortunate  in  that  she 
has  never  lacked  men  of  vision  and  of  courage, 
willing  to  stand  up  to  be  counted,  even  if  they 
had  to  stand  alone.  In  the  reign  of  Louis  XV, 
sunk  in  lust  and  corruption,  the  frail  Voltaire 
cried  aloud  in  the  wilderness  for  justice  to  Galas 
and  never  desisted  until  the  hideous  wrong  was 
righted  in  so  far  as  this  might  be.  In  the  Sec- 
ond Empire  of  that  shabby  and  shoddy  adven- 
turer, Napoleon  III,  Victor  Hugo,  the  foremost 
figure  in  French  literature,  remained  in  volun- 
tary exile  and  never  ceased  his  protest  against 
the  usurper.  And  finally  in  the  Third  Re- 
public, when  the  iniquity  against  Dreyfus  had 
been  consummated  and  when  public  opinion 
was  overwhelming  in  favor  of  accepting  the 
verdict  of  the  military  court  as  settling  the 
question  absolutely  and  forever,  a  little  group 
of  the  Intellectuals  refused  to  take  part  in  this 
conspiracy  of  silence.  They  declined  to  be  satis- 
fied with  any  solution  of  the  difficulty  which 

32 


THE  DUTY   OF   THE  INTELLECTUALS 

was  a  betrayal  of  justice.  It  was  the  famous 
letter  of  Emile  Zola,  "I  accuse,"  with  its  vigor- 
ous and  vehement  rhetoric,  which  rang  forth  as 
a  clarion  call  to  all  those  who  held  eternal  right 
superior  to  temporary  expediency.  Nor  was 
Zola  alone  in  his  attitude;  Anatole  France  was 
not  less  resolute;  and  they  were  only  two  out 
of  a  host  of  the  Intellectuals. 

It  is  not  often  that  a  state  is  reduced  to  the 
pitiable  condition  depicted  by  Plato  when  its 
multitude  is  mad  and  when  there  is  no  one 
whose  action  in  public  matters  is  sound.  The 
saving  remnant  may  be  very  small;  its  members 
may  be  very  few;  and  yet  it  is  able  to  manifest 
itself  and  to  make  itself  heard  and  to  do  what 
it  can  to  counteract  the  contagion  of  hysteria 
which  has  captured  the  populace.  It  is  not 
often  that  a  nation  is  found  to  be  without  "hon- 
est followers  of  wisdom."  It  is  not  often — but 
it  does  happen  on  occasion;  and  it  has  happened 
recently.  In  the  second  decade  of  this  century 
we  had  superabundant  evidence  that  a  great 
people  had  declined  into  this  pitiable  condition, 
despairingly  described  by  Plato,  a  people  whom 
we  should  have  held  to  be  almost  immune  from 
hysteria, — a  people  whom  we  should  have  be- 
lieved to  be  more  than  adequately  provided  with 
a  saving  remnant  of  men  who  have  tasted  how 
sweet  and  blessed  a  possession  is  wisdom. 

33 


THE  DUTY  OF   THE   INTELLECTUALS 


IV 

IF  there  ever  was  a  moment  in  the  history  of 
a  great  nation  when  it  had  imperative  need  for 
a  clear-thinking  minority,  stalwart  in  the  faith 
however  few  in  number,  that  moment  arrived 
in  Germany  in  the  months  which  followed  the 
outbreak  of  the  war.  Then,  if  ever,  was  the 
opportunity  for  the  champions  of  German  cul- 
ture, for  the  Intellectuals  of  Germany,  for  the 
saving  remnant,  to  render  to  their  country  a 
service  of  incalculable  value.  It  was  their 
chance  to  do  for  Germany  in  her  hour  of  mad- 
ness what  the  Intellectual  leaders  of  France  had 
done  for  their  country  in  the  fiery  furor  aroused 
by  the  Dreyfus  affair.  But  there  was  not  a 
single  one  of  the  high  priests  of  German  cul- 
ture who  had  the  courage  to  initiate  the  brave 
attitude  of  Zola  when  he  flung  "I  accuse"  in 
the  face  of  those  who  were  defending  an  inde- 
fensible wrong. 

Not  only  did  the  Intellectuals  of  Germany  fail 
to  urge  moderation  upon  their  fellow-subjects 
and  to  use  their  influence  to  modify  as  far  as 
might  be  the  fierceness  of  popular  feeling,  stimu- 
lated by  every  possible  governmental  organiza- 
tion, but  they  allowed  themselves  to  be  cajoled 
or  coerced  into  signing  a  manifesto  of  which 

34 


THE  DUTY  OF  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

the  sole  effect  in  Germany  itself  was  to  intensify 
the  spirit  of  hate.  It  was  less  than  three  months 
after  the  military  party  had  plunged  Europe 
into  war  that  ninety-three  philosophers  and 
artists,  men  of  letters  and  men  of  science  sent 
forth  their  perfervid  protest  formally  addressed 
"to  the  civilized  world,"  in  which  they  de- 
nounced "the  lies  and  calumnies  with  which 
enemies  are  endeavoring  to  stain  the  honor  of 
Germany  in  her  hard  struggle  for  existence,  a 
struggle  which  has  been  forced  upon  her." 

We  do  not  know  who  was  the  actual  writer 
of  this  manifesto  with  its  declamatory  rhetoric; 
but  whoever  he  may  have  been,  his  fellow- 
signers  made  themselves  responsible  for  his 
series  of  denials  of  things  which  the  civilized 
world  knew  to  be  facts.  Very  likely  it  was  the 
result  of  collaboration  of  several  writers,  uniting 
their  efforts  to  make  their  unfounded  asser- 
tions the  more  emphatic.  They  borrowed  the 
device  of  repeating  their  negative  "It  is  not 
true"  from  the  affirmative  "I  accuse"  of 
Zola's  noble  letter.  But  where  the  Frenchman 
had  stood  up  alone  in  defence  of  what  he  be- 
lieved to  be  right  and  in  defiance  of  what 
seemed  to  be  the  overwhelming  opinion  of  his 
fellow-citizens,  the  German  Intellectuals  en- 
rolled themselves  in  a  company  of  nearly  a  hun- 
dred to  lend  the  weight  of  their  reputations  to  a 

35 


THE  DUTY  OF  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

series  of  assertions,  which  the  majority  of  them 
ought  to  have  known  to  be  unfounded  and  false. 

"It  is  not  true,"  so  they  asserted,  that  the 
Germans  were  guilty  of  causing  the  war,  that 
they  had  trespassed  in  neutral  Belgium,  that 
they  had  wantonly  destroyed  Louvain,  that 
their  warfare  had  violated  international  law,  and 
that  it  was  possible  to  make  a  distinction  be- 
tween German  militarism  and  German  civiliza- 
tion. And  they  ended  their  appeal  to  the  civi- 
lized world  with  this  demand:  "Have  faith  in  us ! 
Believe  that  we  shall  carry  on  this  war  to  the 
end  as  a  civilized  nation,  to  whom  the  legacy  of 
a  Goethe,  a  Beethoven,  and  a  Kant  is  just  as 
sacred  as  its  own  hearths  and  homes." 

This  last  paragraph  may  have  been  meant 
either  as  a  prophecy  or  as  a  promise;  and  in 
either  case  it  has  lamentably  failed  of  per- 
formance. What  would  Goethe  and  Beethoven 
and  Kant  have  thought  of  the  sinking  of  the 
"Lusitania,"  of  the  massacre  of  the  Armenians, 
of  the  deportation  of  the  Belgians  and  of  the 
murder  of  women  and  children  by  bombs  dropt 
from  Zeppelins  upon  unfortified  towns? 

Yet  to  this  protest  the  signers  pledged  their 
names  and  their  honor;  and  these  signers  bore 
the  most  honorable  names  in  Germany,  many 
of  them  enjoying  a  world- wide  reputation. 
Among  them  were  Brandl,  Dorpfeld,  Eucken, 

36 


THE  DUTY  OF   THE  INTELLECTUALS 

Fulda,  Haeckel,  Harnack,  Hauptmann,  Hun- 
perdinck,  Ostwald,  Roentgen,  Sudermann,  Wil- 
lamovitz-Moellendorf  and  Wundt.  Perhaps  it 
is  only  fair  to  apportionate  the  blame  between 
the  artists  and  the  scientists  and  to  relieve  the 
former  of  a  little  of  the  odium  which  the  latter 
cannot  escape.  The  men  of  letters,  the  drama- 
tists, the  musicians,  may  perhaps  be  a  little 
more  excusable  for  surrendering  to  the  emotion 
of  the  moment,  since  their  art  is  impossible 
without  abundant  feeling.  Artists  must  possess 
emotion,  even  if  they  ought  also  to  be  dowered 
with  intelligence.  But  what  might  be  excused 
in  men  of  letters  is  inexcusable  in  men  of  science, 
who  do  not  need  emotion  and  whose  function 
it  is  to  know, — and  to  know  with  absolute  pre- 
cision. It  is  the  immitigable  duty  of  the  scien- 
tist to  suppress  his  personal  equation,  to  see  the 
thing  as  it  really  is,  and  to  report  on  it  without 
exaggeration  or  diminution,  and  to  assert  noth- 
ing that  he  cannot  prove.  But  here  we  find 
the  chief  German  scientists,  historians  and 
physicists  alike,  making  solemn  asseverations 
about  things  which  they  had  not  scientifically 
investigated  and  as  to  which  they  had  no  secure 
knowledge.  Their  desertion  dealt  a  death- 
blow to  the  reputation  of  German  science;  and 
this  reputation  was  not  wounded  in  the  house 
of  its  enemies,  it  was  assassinated  by  its  friends. 

37 


THE  DUTY   OF   THE  INTELLECTUALS 

It  may  be  argued  that  these  German  Intel- 
lectuals made  a  superb  self-sacrifice  when  they 
pledged  their  names  and  their  honor  to  reckless 
misstatements  and  that  they  merely  proffered 
their  reputations  as  the  German  soldiers  were 
risking  their  lives.  If  this  was  the  motive  of 
any  of  them,  as  it  may  very  well  have  been,  the 
sacrifice  was  in  vain.  When  the  Roman  Curtius 
plunged  into  the  fiery  gulf,  he  knew  in  advance 
that  his  heroic  deed  would  cause  the  gaping 
earth  to  close.  But  when  these  German  Intel- 
lectuals flung  their  names  and  their  honor  into 
the  chasm,  it  yawned  only  the  wider. 

Here  is  one  obvious  explanation  of  the  pitiful 
plight  in  which  Germany  found  herself  a  little 
later,  without  a  single  friend,  except  her  vassal 
allies,  and  with  the  civilized  world  in  arms 
against  her.  Her  Intellectuals  failed  her  in  her 
hour  of  need;  they  did  not  stand  forth  as  honest 
followers  of  wisdom;  they  allowed  themselves 
to  be  drafted  by  the  military  machine  as  docilely 
as  the  cannon-fodder  in  the  ranks  of  the  regi- 
ments that  invaded  Belgium.  And  their  dere- 
liction from  their  duty  dates  further  back,  to 
the  days  long  before  the  war  when  they  made 
no  effort,  singly  or  collectively,  to  counteract 
the  insidious  megalomania  which  was  dominat- 
ing Germany.  They  did  not  combat  this  boast- 
fulness;  they  took  part  in  it.  They  led  the 
shouting  and  the  tumult  of  self-praise.  They 

38 


THE  DUTY  OF  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

thereby  abdicated  their  leadership;  and  we  need 
not  wonder  that  when  this  megalomania  re- 
sulted in  war  they  banded  themselves  together 
to  intensify  the  madness  of  the  multitude. 

These  German  leaders  might  be  intellectual; 
but  they  were  not  intelligent.  They  might  be 
professors  of  psychology;  but  they  had  little 
knowledge  of  human  nature.  They  might  be 
poets  and  playwrights;  but  they  were  deficient 
in  understanding  of  the  human  heart.  They 
were  convinced,  and  they  aided  in  convincing 
the  populace,  that  the  Germans  were  the  chosen 
people,  that  they  were  the  salt  of  the  earth, 
that  they  were  the  elect  of  God,  that  they  were 
supreme  in  all  the  arts  and  in  all  the  sciences. 
Holding  these  convictions  there  was  not  one 
German  Intellectual  who  was  prepared  to  play 
the  part  of  a  Voltaire  or  a  Hugo,  a  Lowell  or 
an  Arnold  and  to  reiterate  the  unwelcome 
truths  that  a  people  needs  to  hear  from  its 
leaders.  Even  in  the  years  of  peace  they  had 
little  self-respecting  independence;  and  when 
war  broke  in  all  its  horror  they  were  unresist- 
ingly dragooned  into  the  sacrifice  of  their  repu- 
tations, their  honor  and  the  honor  of  German 
science 

(1917-) 


39 


Ill 

THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 


Ill 

THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 


I  ONCE  asked  an  architectural  critic  what  he 
thought  of  St.  Patrick's  cathedral  in  New 
York;  and  he  shrugged  his  shoulders  as  he  an- 
swered that  it  was  blameless.  "It  possesses 
everything  that  a  Gothic  cathedral  ought  to 
have — except  life !  In  fact,  it  can  fairly  be  de- 
scribed as  the  definition  of  a  Gothic  cathedral." 
That  is  to  say,  it  is  a  servile  transcription,  de- 
void of  the  freedom  and  the  spontaneity,  the 
originality  and  the  individuality,  which  are  the 
essential  characteristics  of  the  noble  edifices  it 
pretended  to  emulate.  It  is  a  translation,  made 
by  a  man  of  ability,  no  doubt,  but  by  a  man 
who  did  not  think  in  terms  of  Gothic  art. 

I  do  not  venture  even  to  guess  what  may 
have  been  my  artistic  friend's  opinion  of  a 
French  Renascence  house  which  occupies  a 
prominent  position  on  the  Riverside  Drive.  It 
is  an  uninspired  conglomerate  of  several  of  the 
superb  chateaux  on  the  Loire,  cabined,  cribbed 
and  confined  in  a  single  city  block  of  two  or 

43 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

three  acres.  It  stands  revealed  as  a  slavish 
transcript,  without  grace  or  charm  or  power. 
On  the  banks  of  the  Loire  it  would  be  a  poor 
thing;  and  on  the  banks  of  the  Hudson  it  is  a 
barren  absurdity,  out  of  place  and  out  of  time, 
a  stark  confession  of  architectural  impotence. 

Nor  have  I  dared  to  inquire  what  my  friend 
thought  about  a  Tudor  manor-house,  which  is 
conspicuous  at  Newport.  It  has  been  vaunted 
as  a  triumphant  effort  to  recapture  the  Eliza- 
bethan largeness;  and  it  might  have  seemed 
more  attractive  if  it  had  been  planted  in  the 
center  of  a  spacious  park,  if  it  rose  from  stately 
terraces  with  century-old  turf,  and  if  it  were 
approached  by  winding  drives  arched  over  by 
century-old  oaks.  But  it  is  pitiably  circum- 
scribed in  a  scant  half-dozen  acres,  in  close 
proximity  to  a  host  of  other  country-places, 
many  of  them  quite  as  out  of  keeping  with  the 
American  climate  and  with  American  condi- 
tions. Since  England  is  a  land  of  cloudy  skies 
and  of  frequent  rain,  an  imitation  of  an  Eliza- 
bethan dwelling  could  not  have  the  sheltering 
verandas  essential  in  the  bold  sunshine  of  our 
hot  American  summers.  The  Tudor  mansions 
which  this  American  dwelling  aped  had  been 
properly  adjusted  to  the  climatic  conditions  of 
the  British  Isles,  very  northerly  and  made  habi- 
table only  by  the  warmth  of  the  Gulf  Stream. 

44 


THE  DWELLING   OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

Moreover,  if  an  Elizabethan  residence  is  to  be 
reproduced  honestly,  the  American  imitation 
must  forego  not  only  the  veranda  but  also  the 
carpets  and  the  bath-rooms,  unknown  to  the 
subjects  of  the  Virgin  Queen,  who  were  accus- 
tomed to  the  strewing  of  their  floors  with  rushes 
and  to  the  free  and  frequent  use  of  perfumes 
instead  of  bathing. 

To  build  a  Gothic  cathedral  over  here  or  a 
French  chateau  or  an  Elizabethan  manor-house, 
is  akin  to  renouncing  the  use  of  our  own  lan- 
guage as  it  is  spoken  in  our  own  time  and  in 
our  own  country.  It  is  an  attempt,  foredoomed 
to  failure,  to  speak  a  tongue  not  our  own,  the 
grammar  of  which  has  been  acquired  painfully 
and  the  idioms  of  which  have  to  be  appre- 
hended as  best  we  can.  It  is  not  unlike  the 
unfortunate  effort  to  write  Greek  plays  in  Eng- 
lish,— a  vain  attempt  to  tell  a  story  on  the  stage 
not  in  accord  with  the  conditions  of  our  snug 
twentieth  century  playhouses,  roofed  and  lighted, 
but  in  conformity  with  what  we  believe  we  know 
about  the  conditions  of  the  theater  of  Dionysus, 
several  centuries  before  the  Christian  era,  an 
immense  open  air  amphitheater,  stage-less  and 
scenery-less. 

It  is  a  matter  of  common  knowledge  that  the 
best  Greek  plays  were  written  by  the  Greeks 
themselves;  and  they  were  satisfied  with  their 

45 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

own  methods  of  dramatic  composition  and  did 
not  shackle  themselves  by  deference  to  any 
models  which  may  have  existed  in  earlier  and 
alien  civilizations.  So  the  noblest  Gothic  cathe- 
drals were  erected  by  those  to  whom  Gothic  was 
vernacular;  the  finest  French  chateaux  were 
constructed  by  the  French  themselves  in  the 
spacious  days  of  the  Renascence;  and  the  state- 
liest Elizabethan  mansions  were  built  by  the 
Elizabethans.  If  there  is  no  hope  of  surpassing 
or  even  of  equalling  the  originals  why  should 
we  waste  our  energies  in  the  futile  endeavor  to 
imitate  the  inimitable  ?  After  all,  there  are  ad- 
vantages in  being  your  own  contemporary  and 
your  own  fellow-citizen;  and  Charles  Lamb  was 
not  to  be  taken  seriously  when  he  cried,  "Hang 
the  age!  I'll  write  for  antiquity!"  Altho  he 
had  nourished  his  style  by  loving  study  of  his 
literary  ancestors,  the  *  Essays  of  EhV  are  not 
written  in  Wardour-street  English. 

There  is  the  same  unreality  about  all  these 
architecture  echoings  that  there  is  about  the 
historical  novel  with  its  inevitably  unsuccessful 
struggle  to  recapture  the  spirit  of  the  past  and 
with  its  equally  unavoidable  anachronisms. 
No  one  of  us  by  taking  thought  can  step  off 
his  own  shadow;  and  no  one  of  us  can  ever 
hope  to  put  his  clock  back  to  any  departed 
century.  It  is  impossible  to  dispossess  our- 


THE  DWELLING   OF  A   DAY-DREAM 

selves  of  our  accretions  of  knowledge  and  not 
to  credit  to  the  past  more  or  less  of  the  wisdom 
of  the  present.  The  fundamental  falsity  of  the 
historical  novel  was  never  more  flagrantly  dis- 
closed than  in  the  German  tale,  wherein  the 
soldier  bade  his  wife  farewell,  with  the  explana- 
tion, that  "I  am  now  leaving  you  for  the  Seven 
Years  War!" 

"The  effort  to  reproduce  the  peculiarities  of 
antiquity,"  as  Mr.  Santayana  has  asserted,  "is 
a  proof  that  we  are  not  its  natural  heirs,  that 
we  do  not  continue  antiquity  instinctively. 
People  can  mimic  only  what  they  have  not  ab- 
sorbed. They  reconstruct  and  turn  into  archae- 
ological masquerade  only  what  strikes  them  as 
outlandish.  The  genuine  inheritors  of  a  re- 
ligion or  an  art  never  dream  of  reviving  it;  its 
antique  accidents  do  not  interest  them,  and  its 
eternal  substance  they  possess  by  nature." 

II 

INDEFENSIBLE  as  is  the  endeavor  to  import 
architecture  "in  the  original  package,"  it  is  not 
more  absurd  than  the  attempt  to  borrow  deco- 
ration ready-made.  In  trying  to  transplant  a 
French  chateau  or  an  English  manor-house, 
there  is  evident  the  desire  to  have  at  least  a 
dwelling  of  a  single  style,  however  unoriginal  it 

47 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

may  be;  but  even  more  frequent  of  late  in  the 
United  States  than  these  homogeneous  plagia- 
risms are  the  houses  whose  connecting  rooms 
display  a  heterogeny  of  disparate  and  discordant 
elements  each  of  them  violently  swearing  at  its 
neighbor.  This  is  what  is  known  as  "period" 
furnishing  and  "period"  decoration. 

A  room  rigidly  reproducing  the  stiff  severity 
of  the  French  Empire  will  open  into  another 
hung  with  the  tapestries  and  filled  with  the 
furniture  of  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV;  and  this  in 
turn  may  lead  into  a  third  where  the  decora- 
tion is  Adam  and  where  the  chairs  are  Chippen- 
dale. A  Byzantine  entrance  may  conduct  the 
visitor  to  a  Gothic  hall  on  his  way  to  a  Louis 
XVI  drawing-room  and  to  a  George  II  dining 
room,  opening  out  on  a  Spanish  patio  arranged 
as  a  conservatory  or  on  an  Egyptian  tomb 
forced  into  service  as  a  billiard-room.  The  bed- 
rooms may  be  Japanese  or  Chinese,  Hindu  or 
Persian;  and  the  only  American  room  in  the 
house  is  likely  to  be  the  kitchen, — unless  per- 
chance the  headstrong  owner  has  insisted  on 
making  this  Pompeian  or  Assyrian. 

Could  anything  be  less  artistic  than  this  in- 
consistent medley  of  periods  and  of  places? 
Could  anything  be  more  like  an  architectural 
crazy-quilt?  Could  anything  be  less  home- 
like? How  can  anybody  ever  expect  that  his 
48 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

household  gods  will  settle  down  comfortably  in 
so  piebald  an  environment?  How  can  any 
twentieth  century  American  reconcile  himself 
to  taking  up  his  residence  in  an  atmosphere  so 
alien  and  so  unfriendly?  How  can  he  feel  the 
warmth  of  his  own  hearth  when  he  has  con- 
demned himself  to  dwell  in  the  frigidity  of  a 
portfolio  of  sample-plates?  The  most  that  the 
owner  of  a  dwelling  so  motley  can  do  is  to  pride 
himself  on  the  accuracy  of  the  imitations  he  has 
purchased  and  to  be  vain  over  his  own  absence 
of  originality. 

There  are  those  who  hold  that  this  devotion 
to  the  period-room  is  the  abomination  of  deso- 
lation, but  who  are  inclined  to  be  more  tolerant 
toward  another  method  of  despoiling  the  alien 
past  to  the  profit  of  the  American  present, — the 
method  applied  with  surpassing  skill  by  the  late 
Stanford  White.  He  attempted  no  facile  repro- 
duction of  the  residence  or  the  apartments  of 
any  one  country  or  of  any  one  epoch;  but  when 
he  travelled  in  Europe  he  was  ever  on  the  look- 
out for  the  beautiful  fittings  of  any  of  the  eras 
when  the  art  of  the  decorator  was  flourishing. 
He  would  purchase  a  superb  marble  mantel- 
piece in  Florence,  a  splendidly  elaborate  pair  of 
carved  doors  in  Venice,  a  heavily  beamed  oak 
ceiling,  with  the  panelling  which  accompanied 
it  in  Prague,  and  tapestries  and  embroidered 

49 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

hangings,  tables  and  chairs,  sideboards  and 
coffers,  in  whatever  city  he  might  visit.  Then 
he  designed  a  dwelling  in  a  free  adaptation  of 
the  formula  of  the  palace  of  the  Italian  Renas- 
cence, proportioning  a  room  to  receive  the 
panelling  and  the  ceiling  he  had  ravished  from 
Bohemia  and  arranging  the  entrance  hall  so 
that  it  could  be  adorned  by  the  marble  mantel- 
piece and  the  carved  doors  of  which  he  had 
despoiled  Italy. 

There  is  no  denying  that  this  process  of  lordly 
conquest  enabled  him  to  achieve  a  captivating 
sumptuousness.  He  had  an  instinctive  under- 
standing of  the  material  means  whereby  he 
could  get  the  utmost  effect  out  of  these  accu- 
mulated spoils.  He  had  taste  and  ingenuity; 
and  he  was  a  born  decorator, — a  belated  but 
not  unworthy  descendant  of  the  many-sided 
artists  of  the  Italian  Renascence.  When  he 
took  the  stalls  of  a  sixteenth  century  church 
hidden  in  one  of  the  forlorn  hill-towns  of  Italy 
and  transformed  them  adroitly  into  a  bookcase 
for  a  twentieth  century  American  residence,  he 
was  inspired  so  to  provide  all  the  other  furnish- 
ings of  the  room  that  there  would  be  a  harmony 
of  effect.  The  result  did  not  correspond  with 
any  one  period  and  there  was  no  desire  for  pe- 
dantic consistency  of  style.  A  house  designed 
and  decorated  by  Stanford  White  was  modern 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

in  its  way,  for  all  its  utilization  of  a  variety  of 
antiques.  It  was  always  brilliant;  and  it  was 
often  beautiful  in  its  luxurious  richness  of  color 
and  of  pattern.  And,  strange  to  say,  it  was  not 
altogether  un-American  in  its  flamboyant  ex- 
pensiveness,  since  America  has  arrogated  the 
right  to  consider  itself  as  the  heir  of  the  ages. 

Yet  this  incorporation  of  exotic  elements  into 
domestic  decoration  rarely  arrived  at  complete 
assimilation;  and  now  and  again  it  stood  con- 
fessed as  little  better  than  a  litter  of  loot.  Even 
when  it  was  most  successful  it  was  open  to  the 
charge  that  it  was  more  or  less  an  attempt  to 
get  fine  art  ready-made;  and  we  are  all  aware 
that  the  ready-made  rarely  fits  as  well  as  the 
made-to-order.  White's  method  was  not  in 
accord  with  the  practise  of  the  great  decorators 
in  the  days  when  decoration  was  greatest.  It 
can  scarcely  be  accepted  as  a  step  forward  in  our 
progress  to  an  American  art  which  shall  be 
truly  our  own 

in 

"MODERN  architecture,"  so  one  of  the  fore- 
most of  American  architects  once  declared, 
"  should  not  be  that  of  the  illogical  architect 
living  in  one  age  and  choosing  a  style  from  an- 
other," whereby  he  is  self-condemned  to  inferi- 
ority. And  Mr.  Hastings  then  pointed  out  that 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

we  are  modern  in  our  dress  and  would  not  think 
"of  wearing  a  Gothic  robe  or  a  Roman  toga; 
but  as  individual  as  we  might  wish  to  be,  we 
should  still  be  inclined,  with  good  taste,  to 
dress  according  to  the  dictates  of  the  day."  He 
reminded  us  also  that  in  each  successive  style 
in  architecture  and  in  decoration  "there  has 
always  been  a  distinct  spirit  of  contemporaneous 
life  from  which  its  root  drew  nourishment." 
And  he  outlined  again  the  evolution  of  Roman 
architecture  out  of  Greek,  as  the  Latins  de- 
manded baths  and  bridges  and  basilicas;  and  in 
meeting  these  calls  upon  their  craft  the  Roman 
architects  modified  the  Greek  forms  until  there 
had  been  evolved  out  of  Greek  a  Roman  archi- 
tecture, which  was  the  result  of  the  new  exigen- 
cies of  the  Latins  themselves.  More  than  a 
thousand  years  later  the  demands  of  the  people 
of  Italy  brought  about  another  evolution,  that 
of  Roman  architecture  into  Renascence,  a  logi- 
cal outgrowth  which  was  attained  only  by  the 
efforts  of  three  generations  of  artists. 

The  architecture  of  the  Italian  Renascence 
had  to  be  modified  again  to  meet  the  different 
demands  of  the  French  when  they  had  their 
Renascence  a  little  later;  and  it  had  to  be  modi- 
fied once  more  to  adjust  itself  to  the  needs  of 
the  people  of  England,  where  the  climate  and 
the  ideals  of  life  were  very  different  from  those 

52 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

of  the  French  or  of  the  Italians.  Again  there 
was  an  assimilation,  an  outgrowth,  an  evolution, 
until  the  result  was  English.  Whistler  might 
declare  that  Christopher  Wren  "had  robbed 
St.  Peter's  to  build  St.  Paul's,'7  but  none  the 
less  is  the  English  cathedral  English  in  its  birth, 
even  if  its  ancestry  is  alien.  In  their  Palladian 
buildings  the  British  were  not  so  much  borrow- 
ing the  patterns  of  Palladio  as  they  were  con- 
tinuing his  tradition,  conforming  their  practise 
to  their  own  needs  and  their  own  desires.  They 
scaled  down  the  stately  proportions  of  the  pal- 
aces of  the  Italian  princes  to  be  commensurate 
with  their  own  more  modest  necessities;  and 
with  little  less  of  beauty  the  marble  villa  be- 
came the  brick  manor-house. 

In  due  time  the  tradition  of  the  Queen  Anne 
and  George  I  architects  was  transplanted  to 
this  side  of  the  Atlantic  and  adjusted  in  turn 
to  our  American  climate  and  ideals  of  life,  con- 
forming itself  to  our  needs  and  desires.  So  it 
was  that  our  ancestors  more  or  less  modified 
the  Georgian  customs;  and  the  result  of  their 
independent  handling  of  their  artistic  heritage 
was  the  outgrowth  which  we  have  chosen  to  call 
"  Colonial."  But  the  men  who  were  responsible 
for  Independence  Hall  and  for  Mount  Vernon 
were  only  building  as  best  they  knew  how  in 
accordance  with  the  spirit  of  their  own  time 

53 


THE  DWELLING   OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

and  in  obedience  to  its  requirements.  They 
never  thought  of  style  as  something  to  be  sought 
for  second-hand,  any  more  than  the  Italians 
had  done  in  their  day  or  the  Romans  or  the 
Greeks  in  theirs.  In  fact,  the  artists  of  a  great 
period  of  architecture  and  decoration  have 
never  thought  of  style.  They  never  felt  that 
they  had  any  liberty  of  choice,  since  neither 
they  nor  their  contemporaries  knew  any  other 
way  to  work.  None  the  less  did  they  achieve 
an  indigenous  individuality;  and  it  did  not  oc- 
cur to  them  to  make  marauding  raids  upon 
a  castle  or  church  that  had  fallen  on  evil  days 
or  to  bind  themselves  to  a  microscopic  fidelity 
to  the  models  which  had  inspired  them. 

These  early  American  builders  might  use 
brick,  imported  from  Holland  or  from  England, 
or  they  might  employ  the  timber  of  the  primitive 
forest,  in  which  case  they  had  again  to  modify 
the  method  they  were  utilizing  all  unconscious 
that  their  new  departures  were  leading  them 
more  than  a  little  way  from  the  patterns  of 
their  immediate  predecessors.  They  made  am- 
ple fireplaces  for  the  huge  logs  which  alone  could 
warm  these  residences  in  our  long  winters;  and 
they  thrust  out  verandas  which  alone  could  pro- 
vide the  shelters  grateful  in  our  scorching  sum- 
mers. They  relied  on  shingles  and  clapboards 
in  default  of  stone  and  slate;  and  they  made  all 

54 


THE   DWELLING   OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

the  other  changes  imposed  by  new  conditions 
in  a  new  world.  They  worked  freely  and  spon- 
taneously each  in  his  own  fashion  and  each 
profiting  by  his  own  individuality.  They  were 
speaking  the  only  language  they  knew;  and  be- 
cause it  was  their  vernacular  they  were  collo- 
quially at  ease  in  it  and  on  occasion  it  encour- 
aged them  to  be  eloquent. 

So  long  as  the  architect  believes  that  "art 
stopped  short  in  the  cultivated  court  of  the  Em- 
press Josephine/'  and  so  long  as  the  decorator 
is  willing  to  be  a  bond-slave  to  a  "period," 
unable  to  call  his  soul  his  own,  just  so  long  will 
their  misguided  imitation  result  in  stagnation 
and  sterility.  Their  art  will  resemble  the  mule 
in  that  it  will  have  no  pride  of  ancestry  and  no 
hope  of  posterity.  It  may  also  reveal  another 
likeness  to  the  mule,  in  that  it  is  obstinate  in 
refusing  to  go  forward. 

A  family  whose  residence  is  a  decorative  grab- 
bag,  even  if  the  furniture  consists  only  of 
"museum-pieces,"  must  feel  more  or  less  as 
tho  it  had  taken  up  its  abode  in  a  curiosity- 
shop,  the  atmosphere  of  which  is  chill  and  in- 
hospitable. Such  a  dwelling  must  always  re- 
main icily  impersonal;  it  cannot  "adapt  itself 
to  its  occupants"  as  Lowell  in  one  of  his  let- 
ters asserted  that  a  home  always  did,  if  it 
was  truly  a  home.  Its  inmates  can  hardly  help 

55 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

looking  upon  themselves  as  transients,  re- 
strained from  capricious  desertion  by  no  cling- 
ing tentacles  of  affection  for  their  own  handi- 
work. They  have  had  little  or  nothing  to  do 
with  its  making;  and  they  need  not  care  what 
becomes  of  it,  when  they  depart  and  surrender 
it  to  others  who  will  be  equally  unable  to  take 
root. 

IV 

WE  have  all  of  us  our  day-dreams;  and  it  is 
one  of  mine  that  if  I  were  a  multi-millionaire, 
still  in  the  prime  of  life  and  fortunate  in  a  wife 
who  was  a  helpmate  and  in  half-a-dozen  sons 
and  daughters  who  might  gather  about  the 
hearth  of  an  evening,  I  would  build  a  house  for 
myself  that  should  be  truly  a  home,  "adapted 
to  its  occupants,'7  made  for  us  and  for  no  one 
else,  fit  for  a  family  to  grow  up  in  and  to  leave 
with  regret  and  to  return  to  with  unfailing  joy. 
Moreover,  it  should  be  a  dwelling  at  once  con- 
temporary and  American,  with  nothing  antique 
or  imitated,  and  with  nothing  alien  or  exotic. 
It  should  be  the  product  of  America  today,  a 
genuine  effort  to  represent  our  country  and  our 
time,  an  expression  of  the  very  best  that  an 
American  architect  could  do  with  the  aid  of  the 
foremost  of  our  painters  and  sculptors. 

If  the  house  of  my  day-dream  could  be  com- 

56 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

pleted  according  to  this  principle,  it  would  be 
as  absolutely  native  to  us  now,  as  an  Italian 
palace  of  the  Renascence  was  to  its  owner;  and 
it  would  be  as  spontaneous  an  outgrowth  of  our 
contemporary  civilization  as  was  a  chateau  on 
the  Loire  or  as  a  Tudor  manor-house,  each  in 
its  own  time  and  place.  Its  designer  would  not 
be  thinking  of  his  " style";  and  he  would  not 
be  straining  himself  in  quest  of  overt  origi- 
nality, any  more  than  did  the  designers  of  the 
palace,  the  chateau  or  the  manor-house. 

The  sky-scraper  is  our  sole  architectural  in- 
vention, the  product  of  our  own  ingenuity  and 
the  result  of  our  own  necessity;  and  at  first  it 
was  nothing  but  an  artistic  monstrosity,  im- 
posing only  from  its  mighty  mass,  because  our 
architects  felt  obliged  to  cramp  it  into  a  pattern 
suited  only  to  buildings  designed  for  wholly 
different  purposes,  and  because  they  strove 
vainly  to  secure  a  satisfactory  esthetic  effect 
by  inappropriate  ornament  externally  applied 
and  only  fortuitously  related  to  the  structure. 
At  last  they  decided  to  eschew  these  adventi- 
tious disguises ;  and  they  are  now  able  to  achieve 
beauty  by  proportion  and  symmetry  and  by  a 
frank  recognition  of  the  sky-scraper's  stark  and 
masculine  uplifting  of  itself  in  air.  Probably  it 
would  not  be  possible  to  make  the  dwelling  of 
my  day-dream  as  distinctively  American  as  the 

57 


THE  DWELLING   OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

sky-scraper;  but  at  least  it  need  not  be  an  empty 
copy  of  a  palace  or  a  chateau  or  a  manor-house. 
Of  course,  it  would  have  to  be  a  modification  of 
the  so-called  "  Colonial  "  house,  adapted  by  our 
ancestors  in  the  days  before  the  Revolution 
from  the  eighteenth  century  houses  of  the 
mother-country. 

What  we  call  " Colonial' '  was  borrowed  from 
England  as  England  had  borrowed  it  originally 
from  Italy;  but  we  have  made  it  our  own  in  the 
course  of  seven  score  years  and  more.  It  is 
now  vernacular;  we  speak  it  naturally;  we  think 
in  it;  and  therefore  we  can  use  it  without  regard 
to  any  standard  existing  elsewhere — excepting 
always  the  abiding  standards  of  fitness  and 
taste.  The  house  I  have  in  my  mind's  eye 
might  be  of  wood  or  of  marble;  but  I  like  best 
to  vision  it  as  of  brick,  ever  a  satisfying  material 
for  a  home.  It  would  have  steel  beams,  un- 
known to  our  ancestors,  because  these  permit 
the  architect  to  get  results  difficult  or  impos- 
sible when  he  is  limited  to  wood.  It  would  be 
absolutely  fireproof,  again  of  course,  because  I 
want  it  to  survive  as  a  home,  generation  after 
generation.  It  must  be  built  by  honest  crafts- 
men, interested  each  of  them  in  his  work  and 
each  of  them  doing  his  best  for  sheer  joy  in 
his  job. 

The  decorations,  the  hangings,  the  wall-papers, 

58 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

the  lighting  fixtures,  the  door-knobs,  the  fire- 
irons,  the  furniture,  the  floor-coverings  should 
all  be  American,  and  contemporary;  and  since 
in  my  dream  I  have  no  need  to  consider  the 
question  of  cost,  these  accompaniments,  when- 
ever they  could  not  be  found  in  the  open  mar- 
ket, should  be  especially  designed  by  the  best 
available  American  artists.  For  example  the 
marble  mantelpieces  that  might  be  needed 
would  not  be  ravished  from  a  Venetian  palace, 
but  modelled  by  the  most  gifted  American 
sculptors  of  our  day.  For  my  fireplaces  there 
are  available  already  firebacks  designed  by  Elihu 
Vedder.  If  tapestries  were  required  for  doors 
and  windows  and  walls  the  cartoons  would  be 
entrusted  to  a  mural  painter  of  distinction  with 
the  suggestion  that  he  should  avail  himself  of 
American  themes  and  of  motives  from  our  na- 
tive flora  and  fauna;  and  the  stuffs  themselves 
should  be  woven  on  American  looms.  And  the 
coverings,  stamped  leather  or  embroidered  tex- 
tiles, should  also  be  the  result  of  the  loving 
labor  of  American  artisan-artists. 

The  furniture  also  should  be  American,  in 
harmony  with  the  architecture  and  therefore 
inspired  more  or  less  by  the  English  models 
which  our  forebears  brought  over  with  them. 
But  these  models  would  not  be  baldly  imitated; 
they  would  serve  only  as  suggestions  for  the 

59 


THE  DWELLING  OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

furniture  called  for  by  our  latter-day  liking  for 
comfort  and  even  for  luxury.  If  this  furniture, 
found  in  the  market-place  as  it  might  be,  or 
specially  designed  as  it  might  have  to  be, 
proved  to  be  harmonious  with  the  house  it  was 
to  help  become  a  home,  it  would  somehow  re- 
veal itself  as  adequately  American,  even  if  it 
avoided  all  wilful  effort  at  needless  originality. 
I  have  seen  in  more  than  one  New  York  club- 
house furniture  bold  in  its  lines  and  yet  un- 
obtrusive, fit  for  its  social  use,  wholly  unpre- 
tentious, not  consciously  of  any  " period" — 
except  our  own.  In  the  furniture,  as  in  all  the 
other  adornments  of  my  dream-dwelling,  and 
as  in  the  house  itself,  the  artists  would  feel  at 
liberty  to  profit  by  the  best  that  the  past  has 
bequeathed  to  us,  but  they  would  not  be  bound 
or  circumscribed  by  a  false  fidelity  to  any  of 
their  predecessors. 

And  when  this  residence  for  the  multi- 
millionaire, which  I  am  not,  may  arise  in  actual 
brick  and  steel  and  slate,  and  when  it  may  find 
itself  roofed  at  last,  finished  within  and  with- 
out, and  furnished  in  absolute  fitness,  it  would 
be  a  " period"  house, — but  the  period  would  be 
now  and  here,  New  York  in  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury; and  if  it  should  chance  to  survive  to  later 
centuries  it  would  show  them  the  best  that  we 
can  do  when  we  set  out  to  build  a  house — just 
60 


THE  DWELLING   OF  A  DAY-DREAM 

as  the  Italian  palace  survives,  the  French  cha- 
teau and  the  English  manor-house.  It  might 
not  be  the  equal  of  any  one  of  these  master- 
pieces of  the  past;  but  it  would  be  the  result  of 
an  endeavor  akin  to  that  which  had  called  them 
into  being. 

This  dwelling  of  my  day-dream  is  only  a 
cloud-capped  tower  and  I  know  that  I  may  not 
live  to  see  it  translated  into  fact,  even  for  some 
other  home-maker.  But  as  Thoreau  assured 
us,  "If  you  have  built  castles  in  the  air,  your 
work  need  not  be  lost;  that  is  where  they  should 
be.  Now  put  the  foundations  under  them." 
And  this  is  the  pleasant  task  I  suggest  to  some- 
one else. 

(1917-) 


61 


IV 
WHAT   IS   AMERICAN   LITERATURE? 


IV 
WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 


TT  was  in  the  ninth  decade  of  the  nineteenth 
T>.  century  that  a  British  historian  of  the  ex- 
pansion of  the  British  race  proclaimed  boldly 
the  permanent  unity  of  the  several  peoples  who 
have  English  for  their  mother-tongue  despite 
whatever  political  severance  may  have  taken 
place.  When  John  Richard  Green  came  to  re- 
cord the  revolt  of  the  American  colonies  from 
British  rule  and  the  establishment  of  the  inde- 
pendence of  the  United  States  he  asserted  that 
since  1776  "the  life  of  the  English  people  has 
flowed  not  in  one  current,  but  in  two;  and  while 
the  older  has  shown  little  sign  of  lessening,  the 
younger  has  fast  risen  to  a  greatness  which  has 
changed  the  face  of  the  world.  In  wealth  and 
material  energy,  as  in  numbers,  it  far  surpasses 
the  mother-country  from  which  it  sprang.  It 
is  already  the  main  branch  of  the  English  people; 
and  in  the  days  that  are  at  hand  the  main  cur- 
rent of  that  people's  history  must  run  along  the 
channel,  not  of  the  Thames  or  the  Mersey,  but 
of  the  Hudson  and  the  Mississippi." 

65 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN   LITERATURE? 

If  an  American  had  penned  this  eloquent 
paragraph,  he  would  have  laid  himself  open  to 
the  charge  of  boastfulness;  and  even  when  an 
American  merely  quotes  it,  he  has  the  uneasy 
feeling  that  he  may  be  indulging  in  a  specimen 
of  that  vainglorious  "tall  talk"  which  was  once 
unduly  prevalent  in  the  juvenile  United  States. 
Yet  it  is  well  that  the  facts  in  the  case  should  be 
stated  thus  clearly  by  a  British  author  of  high 
authority,  for  these  facts  are  often  forgotten 
or  at  least  overlooked  by  other  men  of  letters 
both  British  and  American.  It  is  useful,  and 
indeed  it  is  needful,  for  us  all  on  both  sides  of 
the  Atlantic  to  be  reminded  now  and  again 
that  the  people  of  the  British  Isles  and  the  im- 
mense majority  of  the  people  of  the  United 
States  come  of  the  same  stocks,  speak  the  same 
language,  and  possess  in  common  the  same 
literature. 

By  the  aid  of  an  association  of  scholars, 
mainly  British  but  occasionally  American,  the 
long  story  of  the  development  of  English  litera- 
ture in  the  British  Isles  has  been  narrated  in  de- 
tail in  the  fourteen  volumes  of  the  Cambridge 
History;  and  now  there  have  been  added  four 
volumes  setting  forth  the  far  briefer  story  of  its 
development  in  the  United  States.  These  four 
additional  volumes  deal  exclusively  with  that 
subdivision  of  English  literature  which  is  natu- 
66 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 

rally  and  necessarily  known  as  American  lit- 
erature, but  which  in  spite  of  its  separatist 
name  is  none  the  less  an  integral  part  of  English 
literature  not  to  be  omitted  from  any  attempt 
at  a  comprehensive  survey  of  the  whole. 

Unfortunately  more  than  one  American  his- 
torian of  the  later  literature  which  has  come 
into  being  in  the  United  States  and  more  than 
one  British  historian  of  the  earlier  literature 
which  was  born  in  the  British  Isles,  have  chosen 
to  deal  with  these  unequal  portions  of  English 
literature  as  tho  they  were  each  of  them  self- 
contained  entities  in  no  wise  related  to  one 
another,  thus  apparently  setting  what  must  be 
termed  American  literature  in  opposition  to 
English  literature,  of  which  it  is  only  a  subdivi- 
sion. Yet  to  detach  American  literature  from 
English  literature  is  to  deny  the  essential  unity 
of  the  literature  of  our  language. 

II 

IT  ought  to  be  obvious  that  the  literature  of 
any  language  is  one  and  indivisible.  It  ought 
therefore  to  be  indisputable  that  no  book  of 
recognized  literary  merit,  no  book  in  which  we 
discover  the  twin  qualities  of  style  and  of  sub- 
stance, can  fairly  be  omitted  from  any  complete 
consideration  of  the  literature  of  the  language 
67 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 

in  which  it  was  composed,  regardless  of  the  na- 
tivity or  the  citizenship  of  its  author  or  of  any 
political  separation  which  may  have  taken  place 
between  the  several  peoples  who  possess  that 
language  in  common.  It  is  an  unfortunate  fact, 
however,  that  now  and  again  we  do  find  Ameri- 
can books  and  American  authors  omitted  from 
histories  of  English  literature,  altho  we  fail  to 
find  any  corresponding  exclusion  in  the  his- 
tories of  any  other  literature,  even  when  the 
circumstances  seem  to  be  similar,  not  to  say 
identical. 

For  example,  no  historian  of  Greek  literature 
has  ever  ventured  to  pass  over  Theocritus,  altho 
that  Syracusan  idyllist  owed  no  allegiance  to 
any  Greek  state,  and  altho  he  may  never  have 
set  foot  on  the  soil  of  Greece;  and  no  historian 
of  French  literature  has  ever  hesitated  to  con- 
sider the  work  and  the  influence  of  Madame  de 
Stael,  who  was  Swiss  by  birth,  who  was  Scandi- 
navian by  marriage,  and  who  was  long  exiled 
from  France.  For  these  historians  of  Greek 
and  of  French  literature  it  was  sufficient  that 
Theocritus  wrote  in  Greek  and  that  Madame  de 
Stael  wrote  in  French.  The  alien  Theocritus 
may  be  solitary  in  Greek  literature,  but  the 
alien  Madame  de  Stael  has  a  host  of  parallels 
in  French  literature. 

Every  historian  of  the  development  of  literary 

68 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN   LITERATURE? 

art  in  France  discusses  in  turn  Saint  Francis  de 
Sales,  who  was  a  subject  of  Savoy  and  who  re- 
fused to  become  a  Frenchman,  the  Scot  Anthony 
Hamilton,  the  Swiss  Rousseau,  the  German 
Grimm  and  the  Italian  Galiani.  When  the 
author  of  a  manual  of  French  literature  comes 
to  the  nineteenth  century  he  pays  attention, 
proportionate  to  their  individual  importance, 
to  the  writings  of  the  brothers  de  Maistre,  who 
were  born  in  Savoy,  of  M.  Maurice  Maeterlinck 
who  was  born  in  Belgium,  of  Louis  Frechette 
who  was  born  in  Canada  and  of  M.  Viele"- 
Griffin  who  was  born  in  the  United  States. 
Moreover,  Petit  de  Julleville  and  Brunetiere 
were  led  logically  by  this  inclusion  of  alien  au- 
thors who  wrote  French  to  the  exclusion  of 
French  authors  who  wrote  only  in  Latin,  Abelard 
and  Saint  Bernard,  de  Thou,  Scaliger  and  Casau- 
bon.  It  is  perhaps  even  more  significant  that 
the  new  'Library  of  Spanish  Authors'  compre- 
hends only  writers  of  Castilian  "including,  of 
course,  those  born  in  the  Spanish-American  re- 
publics," and  yet  excluding  the  native  Spaniards 
who  wrote  in  Catalan. 

In  spite  of  the  admirable  example  thus  set  by 
these  foreign  scholars  who  recognize  the  essen- 
tial unity  of  the  literature  of  any  language,  it  is 
not  unusual  to  find  British  historians  of  Eng- 
lish literature  who  bestow  ample  space  upon  the 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 

French  poems  of  Chaucer  and  the  Latin  poems 
of  Milton,  and  yet  who  deny  any  consideration 
to  the  essays  of  Emerson,  the  romances  of  Haw- 
thorne, and  the  poetry  of  Poe  and  Whitman 
composed  in  the  English  language,  the  mother- 
tongue  of  Whitman  and  Poe,  of  Hawthorne  and 
Emerson,  as  it  was  the  mother-tongue  of  Milton 
and  of  Chaucer. 

Ill 

PROBABLY  the  explanation  of  these  occasional 
departures  from  the  precedent  accepted  as  im- 
perative by  the  historians  of  every  other  litera- 
ture must  be  sought  in  the  unprecedented  rela- 
tion of  the  United  States  to  Great  Britain.  For 
the  first  time  in  the  world's  history  a  group  of 
colonies  having  achieved  its  independence  of 
the  mother  country  and  having  organized  itself 
into  a  separate  nation,  has  gone  on  its  own  way 
and  followed  its  own  destiny  until  at  last  its 
population  has  come  to  outnumber  that  of  the 
parent  islands  two  to  one.  And  this  immense 
increase  of  population  in  the  United  States  has 
not  been  derived  exclusively  from  the  British 
Isles  or  even  from  the  kindred  stocks  out  of 
which  the  British  population  was  originally  re- 
cruited. As  a  result  of  this  development  and 
of  this  divergence  the  Americans  and  the  British 
are  at  once  alike  and  unlike;  and  perhaps  both 
parties  are  more  acutely  conscious  of  the  points 
70 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 

of  dissimilarity  than  of  the  points  of  similarity. 
The  inhabitants  of  Great  Britain  and  the  in- 
habitants of  the  United  States  know  themselves 
to  be  the  same  and  yet  not  the  same.  They  are 
the  same  in  that  the  Americans  have  inherited 
the  language,  the  laws  and  the  political  ideals 
which  the  British  had  earlier  evolved.  They 
are  not  the  same  in  that  the  Americans,  having 
governed  themselves  for  now  nearly  a  century 
and  a  half,  have  had  to  solve  their  own  prob- 
lems in  their  own  fashion  in  their  own  continent, 
while  the  British  in  their  group  of  islands  have 
acquired  a  mighty  empire  and  have  had  to  con- 
front difficulties  very  different  from  those  which 
rose  before  their  former  colonists. 

As  a  result  of  these  dissimilar  necessities  the 
British  and  the  Americans  have  developed  each 
in  their  own  direction  and  they  have  grown 
apart  in  spite  of  their  retention  of  a  common 
language  and  of  the  common  law.  They  are 
two  great  nations,  rivals  in  discovery  and  inven- 
tion, rivals  in  the  arts,  rivals  in  commerce  and 
in  finance.  They  are  friendly  rivals,  no  doubt, 
and  they  do  not  feel  that  latent  hostility  toward 
each  other  which  they  may  feel  toward  those 
who  speak  foreign  tongues;  there  has  been  a 
hundred  years  of  peace  between  them;  and  an- 
other war  is  unthinkable.  None  the  less  is 
each  of  them  acutely  conscious  of  its  own  inde- 
pendent nationality  and  jealous  of  its  own  indi- 

71 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 

viduality.  It  is  small  wonder,  then,  that  writers 
on  one  side  of  the  Atlantic  or  on  the  other  lack- 
ing in  insight  into  fundamental  facts,  should 
sometimes  be  tempted  to  segregate  American 
literature  and  to  set  it  apart  by  itself.  We  may 
even  doubt  whether  the  historians  of  French 
literature  would  have  been  so  unhesitatingly 
cordial  to  the  Swiss  and  to  the  Belgian  authors 
who  had  French  for  their  sole  means  of  communi- 
cating with  the  rest  of  the  world,  if  Switzerland 
now  surpassed  France  in  population  and  if  Bel- 
gium now  exceeded  it  in  power. 

While  the  Americans  of  today  are  still  Eng- 
lish in  many  ways  they  are  in  no  wise  British; 
and  even  the  original  immigrants,  Cavaliers  in 
Virginia  and  Pilgrims  in  Massachusetts,  right 
Elizabethans  as  they  were,  suffered  a  sea  change 
speedily  and  became  subdued  to  what  they  lived 
in.  Nevertheless  from  the  very  beginning  they 
held  fast  to  their  birthright  in  the  English  law, 
in  the  English  language  and  in  English  litera- 
ture. To  these  traditions  they  were  ever  loyal; 
and  even  when  they  rose  against  the  agents  of 
the  British  King,  they  held  themselves  children 
of  Chaucer,  subjects  of  Shakspere,  heirs  of  Mil- 
ton. Even  tho  they  dwell  under  alien  skies, 
with  the  thousand  leagues  of  the  Western  Ocean 
between  the  broad  new  land  and  the  old  island 
home  of  the  race,  they  have  always  claimed 
Chaucer  and  Shakspere  and  Milton  as  theirs  by 
72 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 

heritage,  denying  any  assertion  of  primogeni- 
ture which  might  disinherit  them.  They  have 
had  a  stalwart  satisfaction  in  their  ownership  of 
English  literature  as  a  whole;  and  their  descen- 
dants of  today  refuse  sturdily  to  be  put  off 
with  a  younger  brother's  portion. 

IV 

WHILE  we  Americans  have  ever  gloried  in 
our  inheritance  of  English  literature  we  have 
also  had  a  natural  pride  in  our  own  authors 
and  in  that  native  literature  which  began  ten- 
tatively in  the  eighteenth  century,  which  re- 
vealed itself  more  amply  in  the  nineteenth, 
and  which  possesses  unknown  possibilities  of 
expansion  in  the  twentieth.  When  Matthew 
Arnold  suggested  to  Sainte-Beuve  that  La- 
martine  was  not  an  important  poet,  the  wise 
French  critic  replied,  "He  is  important  to  us." 
Certain  American  poets  and  certain  American 
prosemasters  are  important  to  us  Americans, 
even  if  we  are  well  aware  that  they  may  be 
less  important  to  our  kin  across  the  sea.  Tho 
they  may  fail  to  prove  their  ultimate  significance 
when  measured  by  the  universal  and  permanent 
standards,  none  the  less  they  have  special  sig- 
nificance for  us,  whose  struggles  they  have  re- 
corded and  whose  hopes  they  have  shared. 
"Every  race,"  said  Brunetiere  in  his  history  of 

73 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 

French  literature,  "is  the  judge, — and  must  be 
the  only  judge — of  its  own  poets."  Thus  it  is 
that  Racine  and  Lamartine,  for  example,  are 
justifiably  rated  far  higher  by  their  own  coun- 
trymen than  would  be  warranted  by  a  truly 
cosmopolitan  examination  of  their  works. 

To  hold  the  scales  even  and  to  weigh  the 
American  men  of  letters,  one  after  another, 
with  the  weights  which  have  international  valid- 
ity, is  a  task  as  delicate  as  it  is  difficult.  Yet  it 
is  a  little  less  difficult  today — even  if  it  is  not 
less  delicate — than  it  was  a  century  ago,  when 
Sydney  Smith  was  asking  "Who  reads  an  Amer- 
ican book?"  Previous  to  the  appearance  of 
the  'Sketch  Book  of  Geoffrey  Crayon'  and  of 
the  'Spy,'  the  accepted  belief  that  a  great  na- 
tion ought  to  have  great  poets,  and  that  the 
United  States  ought  to  be  endowed  at  once  with 
a  literature  commensurate  with  the  expanse  of 
the  country,  had  lured  more  than  one  native 
bard,  possest  of  aspiration  rather  than  inspira- 
tion, into  the  concoction  of  ponderous  epics,  to 
be  read  by  title  only. 

This  was  a  manifestation  of  provincialism, 
of  the  desire  of  a  locality  on  the  circumference 
to  demand  equality  with  the  spot  in  the  center 
of  things.  Provincialism  may  be  defined  as 
an  uneasy  self-assertion  supported  by  faith 
but  not  justified  by  works.  It  was  painfully 

74 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 

prevalent  in  the  United  States  in  the  first  half 
of  the  nineteenth  century;  and  it  was  sharply 
satirized  by  Lowell  in  an  often  quoted  passage 
of  the  'Fable  for  Critics': 

Why,  there's  scarcely  a  huddle  of  log-huts  and  shanties 
That  has  not  brought  forth  its  Miltons  and  Dantes: 
I  myself  know  ten  Byrons,  one  Coleridge,  three  Shel- 

leys, 

Two  Raphaels,  six  Titians  (I  think),  one  Apelles. 
Leonardos  and  Rubenses  plenty  as  lichens; 
One  (but  that  one  is  plenty)  American  Dickens, 
A  whole  pack  of  Lambs,  any  number  of  Tennysons; 
In  short,  if  a  man  has  the  luck  to  have  any  sons 
He  may  feel  pretty  certain  that  one  out  of  twain 
Will  be  some  very  great  person  over  again. 

And  in  these  same  earlier  decades  of  the  last 
century  there  was  to  be  observed  by  the  side 
of  the  self-assertion  of  provincialism  the  self- 
abasing  attitude  of  colonialism,  of  the  inability 
to  see  our  own  except  thru  spectacles  belonging 
to  British  critics.  Colonialism  may  be  denned 
as  a  timid  deference  to  the  opinion  of  the  mother 
country  and  as  a  blank  disbelief  that  anything 
good  can  come  out  of  our  own.  Lowell,  tho  he 
did  not  call  it  by  name,  could  not  fail  to  per- 
ceive this  colonialism  as  clearly  as  he  saw  the 
provincialism;  and  he  hit  at  it  in  his  contemptu- 
ous dismissal  of  the  writing  that 

suits  each  whisper  and  motion 
To  what  will  be  thought  of  it  over  the  ocean. 

75 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN   LITERATURE? 


Now,  at  last,  in  these  opening  decades  of  the 
twentieth  century  it  is  possible  for  native  his- 
torians of  the  American  branch  of  English  litera- 
ture to  discuss  it,  if  not  with  absolute  detach- 
ment, at  least  dispassionately,  avoiding  alike 
the  arrogance  of  provincialism  and  the  humility 
of  colonialism.  The  task  is  not  easy  even  now, 
because  the  expansion  of  literature  is  relatively 
so  recent  in  the  United  States,  that  we  shall 
lack  yet  awhile  the  perspective  of  time,  which 
is  unerring  in  assigning  the  exalted  positions  to 
the  authors  of  most  importance  and  of  most 
significance.  By  holding  fast  to  cosmopolitan 
standards  we  may  save  ourselves  any  temptation 
to  take  a  native  goose  for  a  Swan  of  Avon  and 
to  liken  our  mocking-birds  to  the  alien  nightin- 
gale. There  is  not  likely  to  be  any  lamentable 
failure  of  justice,  if  the  several  contributors  to  a 
record  of  the  development  of  English  literature 
here  in  the  United  States  strive  honestly  to  as- 
certain the  exact  position  of  our  leading  authors, 
first  of  all  in  American  literature  itself,  second 
in  English  literature  as  a  whole,  and  thirdly  and 
finally  in  the  larger  literature  of  the  world, 
present  and  past. 

Thirty  years  ago  the  distinguished  Spanish 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 

scholar  who  had  been  representing  his  native 
land  at  Washington,  paused  in  New  York  on 
his  way  home  and  wrote  a  prefatory  note  to  the 
American  translation  of  his  delightful  novel, 
'Pepita  Ximenez.'  In  this  suggestive  and  stim- 
ulating letter  of  introduction  to  the  American 
reading  public,  the  Spanish  author-diplomat  took 
occasion  to  insist  upon  the  essential  unity  of  the 
literature  of  any  language  and  to  dwell  upon 
the  necessary  recognition  of  American  literature 
as  an  integral  part  of  English  literature.  Yet  he 
paid  us  the  compliment  of  remarking  that  we 
Americans  had  brought  to  the  common  fund  of 
the  English-speaking  peoples  and  to  the  cul- 
ture of  the  race  "rich  elements,  fine  traits  of 
character,  and  perhaps  even  higher  qualities." 
He  hoped  for  a  favorable  reception  of  his  trans- 
lated tale,  because  he  had  observed  in  "this 
American  literature,  of  English  origin  and  lan- 
guage, a  certain  largeness  of  view,  a  certain  cos- 
mopolitanism and  affectionate  comprehension 
of  what  is  foreign,  which  is  as  broad  as  the  con- 
tinent that  the  Americans  inhabit  and  which 
forms  a  contrast  to  the  narrow  exclusiveness  of 
the  insular  British." 

It  must  be  noted  that  Don  Juan  Valera  had 
earlier  warned  us  that  it  was  a  delusion  of  na- 
tional vanity  to  believe  that  there  is  or  ever 
will  be,  "anything  that  with  legitimate  and  can- 

77 


WHAT  IS  AMERICAN  LITERATURE? 

did  independence  may  be  called  American  litera- 
ture." And  then  he  made  clear  his  precise 
meaning: 

Greece  diffused  herself  throughout  the  world  in 
flourishing  colonies,  founded  powerful  states  in  Egypt, 
in  Syria,  and  even  in  Bactriana,  among  peoples  who, 
unlike  the  American  Indians,  possessed  a  high  civili- 
sation of  their  own.  But,  notwithstanding  this  dis- 
persion and  this  political  severance  from  the  mother- 
country,  the  literature  of  Syracuse,  of  Antioch  and  of 
Alexandria,  was  as  much  Greek  literature  as  was  the 
literature  of  Athens.  For  the  same  reason  the  Htera- 
ture  of  New  York  and  Boston  will  continue  to  be  as 
much  English  literature  as  the  literature  of  London  and 
Edinburgh;  the  literature  of  Mexico  and  Buenos  Ayres 
will  continue  to  be  as  much  Spanish  literature  as  the 
literature  of  Madrid;  the  literature  of  Rio  Janeiro 
will  be  as  much  Portuguese  literature  as  the  literature 
of  Lisbon.  Political  union  may  be  severed,  but, 
between  peoples  of  the  same  tongue  and  of  the  same 
race,  the  ties  of  spiritual  fraternity  are  indissoluble, 
so  long  as  their  common  civilisation  lasts.  There  are 
immortal  kings  or  emperors  who  reign  and  rule  in 
America  by  true  divine  right  and  against  whom  no 
Washington  or  Bolivar  shall  prevail  and  from  whom 
no  Franklin  can  snatch  the  sceptre.  These  tyrants 
are  named  Cervantes,  Shakspere  and  Camoens. 

(1916.) 


V 

THE   CENTENARY   OF   A   QUESTION 


V 
THE   CENTENARY  OF  A  QUESTION 

'x&'wi  gr'ft 

i 

IT  is  exactly  a  hundred  years  ago  this  month 
since  Sydney  Smith  asked  "Who  reads  an 
American  book  ?  "  This  struck  most  Americans 
of  1820  as  a  most  insulting  question.  It  im- 
mediately aroused  a  riot  of  angry  answers  from 
all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men;  and  it  has  un- 
ceasingly reverberated  through  the  columns  of 
our  literary  periodicals  in  every  year  of  all  the 
hundred  since  it  was  originally  uttered. 

But  after  a  century,  "the  tumult  and  the 
shouting  dies";  and  it  ought  to  be  possible  for 
an  American  of  1920  to  consider  this  famous 
query  with  disinterestedness  if  not  with  de- 
tachment. It  may  even  be  profitable,  now  that 
there  have  been  more  than  five  score  years  of 
peace  between  us  and  our  kin  across  the  sea,  to 
consider  this  query  calmly  in  order  to  dis- 
cover all  the  circumstances  of  its  asking,  and 
even  to  inquire  honestly  whether  there  may  not 
have  been  at  least  a  little  justification  for  it. 

Sydney  Smith  edited  the  first  number  of  the 
81 


THE  CENTENARY   OF  A   QUESTION 

Edinburgh  Review  in  1802;  he  had  proposed  this 
periodical  as  an  organ  for  the  group  of  young 
men  who  were  keenly  dissatisfied  with  the 
complacent  Toryism  which  defended  a  heter- 
ogeny  of  old  abuses;  and  he  continued  to  be  a 
constant  contributor  to  its  liberalizing  pages 
for  a  quarter  of  a  century,  in  spite  of  his  exile  to 
a  remote  Yorkshire  parish.  So  vigorous  were 
the  assaults  of  the  Edinburgh  on  these  abuses 
that  the  Quarterly  Review  was  soon  founded  by 
the  stern  and  unbending  Tories  in  order  that 
"the  Whig  dogs  should  not  have  the  best  of 
it" — to  borrow  Dr.  Johnson's  characteristic 
phrase.  From  its  beginning  the  Quarterly  took 
a  most  offensive  attitude  toward  America  and 
often  exploded  in  violent  vituperation;  and  from 
its  beginning  the  Edinburgh  had  been  far  more 
friendly  toward  us,  as  might  have  been  ex- 
pected from  a  review  started  by  young  and  ar- 
dent reformers  who  could  not  fail  to  recognize 
that  many  of  the  political  improvements  they 
were  advocating  in  Great  Britain  had  already 
been  obtained  in  the  United  States. 

In  the  Edinburgh  Review  for  January  1920 
there  is  a  criticism  of  Adam  Seybert's  '  Statisti- 
cal Annals  of  the  United  States/  published  in 
Philadelphia  in  1818.  It  was  unsigned,  like  all 
the  other  articles,  in  accord  with  the  custom  that 
contributions  to  periodicals  should  be  anon- 
82 


THE   CENTENARY  OF  A  QUESTION 

ymous;  but  we  now  know  that  it  was  written 
by  Sydney  Smith.  It  extends  to  only  eleven 
pages,  ten  of  which  are  devoted  to  an  abstract 
of  the  mass  of  facts  and  figures  in  Seybert's 
quarto.  The  tone  of  the  reviewer  was  benev- 
olent; and  it  was  with  kindly  appreciation  that 
he  transcribed  the  record  of  American  expan- 
sion and  prosperity.  It  was  with  brotherly 
sympathy  that  he  warned  us  that  the  inevitable 
consequences  of  a  nation's  fondness  for  martial 
glory  are  "taxes  upon  every  article  which  enters 
into  the  mouth,  or  covers  the  back,  or  is  placed 
under  foot — taxes  upon  everything  which  it  is 
pleasant  to  see,  hear,  feel,  smell  or  taste — taxes 
on  everything  on  earth,  and  the  waters  under 
the  earth." 

It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  the  friendliness 
of  the  first  ten  pages  of  this  criticism  is  really 
remarkable  when  we  recall  that  it  was  written 
less  than  five  years  after  the  termination  of 
what  we  call  the  "  War  of  1812  "  and  after  the 
defeat  of  the  British  in  the  battle  of  New 
Orleans.  Only  on  the  eleventh  and  last  page 
of  Sydney  Smith's  paper  could  the  most  thin- 
skinned  of  perfervid  patriots  find  anything  in 
any  way  offensive  to  our  national  susceptibility. 
The  sting  was  in  the  tail  of  it, — in  the  conclud- 
ing paragraphs  wherein  we  Americans  were 
warned  not  to  allow  ourselves  to  be  persuaded 

83 


THE  CENTENARY  OF  A  QUESTION 

by  orators  or  newspapers  into  the  belief  that  we 
were  "the  greatest,  the  most  refined,  the  most 
enlightened  and  the  most  moral  people  on 
earth,"  and  in  which  we  were  told  that  the 
effect  of  this  journalistic  boasting  upon  a  Euro- 
pean was  "unspeakably  ludicrous,"  for  altho 
"the  Americans  are  a  brave,  industrious  and 
acute  people/'  they  had  hitherto  "given  no 
indications  of  genius." 

This  general  statement  was  almost  immedi- 
ately supported  by  the  specific  allegation  that 
during  our  forty  years  of  independence,  we  had 
"done  absolutely  nothing  for  the  sciences,  for 
the  arts,  for  literature,  or  even  for  the  states- 
man-like studies  of  politics  or  political  economy." 
Then  Sydney  Smith  called  the  bede-roll  of  the 
orators,  scientists,  theologians,  scholars,  poets, 
actors  and  artists  who  had  illumined  the  same 
two  score  years  in  Great  Britain;  whereupon  he 
asked  if  there  were  American  parallels  to  these 
British  worthies.  This  inquiry  was  followed 
by  that  rattling  volley  of  pointed  questions 
which  has  come  echoing  down  the  corridors  of 
time: 

In  the  four  quarters  of  the  globe,  who  reads  an 
American  book?  or  goes  to  an  American  play?  or  looks 
at  an  American  picture  or  statue?  What  does  the 
world  yet  owe  to  American  physicians  or  surgeons? 
What  new  substances  have  their  chemists  discovered? 


THE  CENTENARY  OF  A  QUESTION 

or  what  old  ones  have  they  analized?  What  new  con- 
stellations have  been  discovered  by  the  telescopes  of 
Americans?  What  have  they  done  in  mathematics? 
Who  drinks  out  of  American  glasses?  or  eats  from 
American  plates?  or  sleeps  in  American  blankets? 

And  the  paper  concluded  with  the  remark 
that  Americans  would  do  well  to  keep  clear  of 
superlatives  of  self-praise  until  these  questions 
were  "fairly  and  favorably  answered." 

II 

IF  this  battery  of  pertinent  queries  were  to  be 
fired  point-blank  at  the  Americans  of  1920,  we 
should  not  wince,  for  we  could  very  well  leave 
to  others  the  finding  of  full  and  favorable  an- 
swers. But  when  it  was  discharged  in  1820, 
we  were  bitterly  annoyed.  Our  national  vanity 
was  painfully  wounded, — that  national  vanity 
which  was  then  unduly  inflated,  because  it  was 
distended  rather  by  our  etherial  hopes  for  the 
future  than  sustained  by  our  solid  accomplish- 
ments in  the  past.  We  were  swollen  with  pride 
in  what  we  were  going  to  do;  we  were  uneasily 
conscious  of  our  manifest  destiny;  and  we  were 
inclined  to  be  vocal  in  flaunting  our  virtues, — 
even  if  we  did  not  actually  assert  that  we  were 
"the  greatest,  the  most  refined,  the  most  en- 
lightened, and  the  most  moral  people  on  earth." 

The  period  of  our  history  from  the  adoption 

85 


THE   CENTENARY  OF  A   QUESTION 

of  the  Constitution  in  1789  to  the  year  when 
Sydney  Smith  punctured  our  complacency  with 
his  saw-toothed  interrogatory,  is  not  a  period 
upon  which  we  can  today  look  back  with  com- 
plete satisfaction.  It  was  an  epoch  of  jangling 
party  strife,  of  occasional  rebellion  and  of 
threatened  secession.  It  was  an  era  of  geo- 
graphical expansion,  and  of  intermittent  pros- 
perity. We  were  spreading  abroad  toward  the 
South  and  the  West;  we  were  sending  our  ships 
to  all  the  ports  of  all  the  seven  seas;  and  we  were 
beginning  to  manufacture  most  of  the  things 
we  needed.  The  airy  hopes  of  a  hundred  years 
ago  have  been  more  or  less  justified  in  the  course 
of  the  century;  but  these  early  aspirations  were 
only  too  often  expressed  in  material  terms,  in 
the  statistics  of  commerce,  in  the  balance  of 
trade,  in  dollars  and  cents.  We  looked  forward 
to  mere  bigness  of  the  body  politic  rather  than 
to  true  greatness  of  the  soul. 

It  cannot  have  been  on  a  day  very  far  distant 
from  that  of  Sydney  Smith's  question  when 
John  Quincy  Adams  made  a  speech  at  New 
Bedford,  in  which  he  reckoned  the  number  of 
whale-ships  sailing  out  of  the  port  and  com- 
pared it  with  that  of  an  earlier  year,  taking  this 
as  a  type  of  American  success.  Lowell,  from 
whom  I  borrow  the  illustration,  made  the  apt 
comment  that  it  is  "with  quite  another  oil  that 
86 


THE  CENTENARY  OF  A  QUESTION 

those  far-shining  lamps  of  a  nation's  true  glory, 
which  burn  forever,  must  be  filled.  It  is  not 
by  any  amount  of  material  splendor  or  pros- 
perity, but  only  by  moral  greatness,  by  ideas, 
by  works  of  imagination  that  a  race  can  con- 
quer the  future.  ...  Of  Carthage,  whose 
merchant-fleets  furled  their  sails  in  every  port 
of  the  known  world,  nothing  is  left  but  the  deeds 
of  Hannibal.  .  .  .  But  how  large  is  the  space 
occupied  in  the  maps  of  the  soul  by  little  Athens ! 
It  was  great  by  the  soul,  and  its  vital  force  is  as 
indestructible  as  the  soul." 

Now,  in  1920,  we  have  good  reason  to  believe 
that  we  possess  sufficient  of  this  vital  force  to 
save  our  soul,  since  after  "drugged  and  doubting 
years"  we  came  at  last  into  the  world-war  in 
defense  of  civilization.  But  what  was  our  state 
in  1820?  That  we  possessed  this  vital  force  a 
hundred  years  ago  is  only  a  hypothesis,  sup- 
ported by  meager  evidence.  We  can  afford  to 
be  honest  with  ourselves  today;  and  if  we  have 
the  courage  to  look  the  fact  in  the  face  we  must 
confess  that  our  forefathers  of  a  century  ago 
could  not  answer  Sydney  Smith's  question 
fairly  and  favorably.  In  fact,  one  reason  why 
this  sharp  thrust  caused  us  such  acute  suffering 
was  that  we  could  not  parry  it  and  that  it 
went  home. 

Whatever  may  be  the  case  in  1920  there  is 


THE  CENTENARY  OF  A  QUESTION 

no  denying  that  in  1820  nobody  was  going  to  an 
American  play,  or  looking  at  an  American  statue 
or  picture.  Our  physicians  and  surgeons  had 
done  nothing  to  relieve  human  suffering;  our 
astronomers  had  discovered  no  new  constella- 
tions and  our  chemists  no  new  substances.  It 
is  true  that  if  Sydney  Smith  had  asked  for  our 
inventions  as  well  as  for  our  discoveries,  we 
could  have  put  in  an  answer  and  called  atten- 
tion to  the  lightning-rod,  to  the  cotton-gin  and 
to  the  steam-boat, — and  even  to  the  torpedo 
and  to  the  submarine,  although  none  of  us  could 
have  foreseen  to  wh?.t  devilish  use  these  devices 
would  be  put  in  the  course  of  time.  And  it  is 
true  also  that  we  could  bring  forward  the  '  Feder- 
alist' as  a  statesman-like  study  of  politics;  but 
Sydney  Smith  was  not  a  prophet  and  he  could 
not  foresee  the  influence  which  Alexander  Ham- 
ilton was  to  exert  upon  the  founders  of  the 
Australian  and  South  African  federations. 

If  we  continue  to  be  honest  we  shall  have  to 
admit  that  our  forefathers  would  have  been  hard 
put  to  find  a  fair  and  favorable  answer,  because 
the  books  of  American  authorship  which  had 
been  published  before  he  insisted  on  this  ex- 
acerbating question  and  which  are  read  today 
by  other  than  professed  students  of  our  literary 
history,  are  very  few  indeed.  No  one  of  us  is 
now  ashamed  to  acknowledge  that  he  is  not 
88 


THE  CENTENARY  OF  A  QUESTION 

familiar  with  Joel  Barlow's  'Columbiad'  or 
with  Timothy  Dwight's  *  Conquest  of  Canaan/ 
those  magniloquent  epics  deliberately  com- 
posed to  supply  a  mighty  nation  with  poems 
commensurate  with  its  magnitude. 

There  is  the  '  Federalist/  but  that  had  served 
its  immediate  purpose  and  not  even  here  in  the 
United  States  did  anybody  suspect  that  it  was 
to  be  revered  as  a  permanent  storehouse  of 
political  wisdom.  There  was  Franklin's  'Auto- 
biography/ but  this  was  not  printed  from  his 
own  manuscript  until  1868,  altho  a  truncated 
French  translation  had  been  published  in  Paris 
in  1791,  from  which  an  English  version  had  been 
made  about  a  score  of  years  later.  Irving's 
'Knickerbocker'  had  been  published  in  1809, 
but  eleven  years  later  it  had  not  yet  been  re- 
published  in  England;  and  altho  a  few  copies  of 
it  had  crossed  the  Atlantic,  Sydney  Smith  could 
not  fairly  be  charged  with  knowledge  of  its  ex- 
istence. Irving's  ' Sketch-Book'  began  to  be 
issued  in  New  York  in  parts  in  1819,  but  the 
last  of  these  did  not  appear  until  1820,  when 
the  complete  book  was  republished  in  London, 
where  it  was  cordially  received, — the  Edinburgh 
Review  for  August  1820  containing  a  most 
friendly  criticism.  The  first  collection  of  Bry- 
ant's poems  did  not  appear  until  1821,  when 
Irving  was  instrumental  in  arranging  for  a 

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THE  CENTENARY  OF  A  QUESTION 

British  edition.  And  it  was  also  in  1820  that 
Fenimore  Cooper  published  the  'Spy,'  to  be  fol- 
lowed in  the  next  five  years  by  the  ' Pilot'  and 
by  the  'Last  of  the  Mohicans.' 

Thus  we  perceive  that  when  Sydney  Smith 
asked  his  question  American  literature  was  just 
about  to  be  born;  and  that  if  he  had  asked  it 
five  or  ten  years  later  there  would  have  been 
no  difficulty  in  supplying  the  fair  and  favorable 
answer.  What  we  need  to  see  clearly  is  that 
American  literature  had  not  really  come  into 
being  in  1820,  however  lustily  it  was  to  stretch 
its  infant  limbs  in  the  decade  immediately  fol- 
lowing. 

Ill 

THE  first  thirty-seven  years  of  our  inde- 
pendence, from  1783  to  1820,  were  years  of 
literary  penury;  and  they  stand  in  startling  con- 
trast with  the  literary  wealth  which  had  been 
accumulated  in  Great  Britain  during  this  period, 
which  was  the  epoch  of  the  Romantic  Revival. 
It  was  the  era  of  a  fresh  outflowering  of  Eng- 
lish poetry,  high-colored  and  full-blooded,  start- 
lingly  different  from  the  paler  prose  which  had 
been  the  product  of  the  first  three  quarters  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  The  Kilmarnock  collec- 
tion of  Burns  had  appeared  in  1786  and  the 
'Lyrical  Ballads'  of  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge 
90 


THE   CENTENARY  OF  A   QUESTION 

in  1798.  Scott's  'Lay  of  the  Last  Minstrel' 
had  come  out  in  1805,  Coleridge's  'Christabel' 
in  1806,  and  Wordsworth's  poems  in  1807. 
Byron's  'Childe  Harold'  began  to  appear  in 
1812;  Shelley's  'Queen  Mab'  was  issued  in 
1813;  and  the  poems  of  Keats  were  published 
in  1817. 

Perhaps  Sydney  Smith  would  have  been 
kinder  if  he  had  refrained  from  the  infliction  of 
futile  anguish  upon  his  American  friends;  but 
it  ought  to  be  evident  now  that  he  had  good 
warrant  for  the  question  he  asked.  It  was 
pointed,  but  it  was  also  to  the  point.  He  may 
have  been  ungenerous,  but  he  was  not  unjust. 
He  may  have  been  moved  not  by  playful  malice, 
but  rather  by  an  honest  desire  to  make  us  see 
ourselves  as  others  saw  us.  He  may  very  well 
have  believed  himself  to  be  not  a  foe  stabbing 
at  a  helpless  victim,  but  a  friend  wielding  a 
scalpel  which  would  relieve  us  of  the  tumor  of 
vainglory. 

I  make  this  suggestion, — irenic  rather  than 
ironic — with  the  more  confidence  because  there 
is  in  the  very  next  number  of  the  Edinburgh 
Review,  that  for  April  1820,  an  article  which 
must  have  been  written  by  Sydney  Smith  and 
which  testifies  to  the  honest  desire  of  the  English 
liberals  to  keep  on  the  best  of  terms  with  the 
young  republic  on  the  far  side  of  the  Western 


THE   CENTENARY  OF  A  QUESTION 

Ocean.  It  is  a  review  of  an  American  book  pub- 
lished in  Philadelphia  in  1819,  written  by  a  cer- 
tain Robert  Walsh  (otherwise  unknown  to 
fame),  and  entitled  'An  Appeal  from  the  Judge- 
ments of  Great  Britain  respecting  the  United 
States  of  America.'  I  have  never  seen  the  book 
itself,  but  from  Sydney  Smith's  frequent  and 
abundant  quotations,  it  appears  to  have  been  a 
heated  protest  against  the  British  writers  who 
were  then  engaged  in  virulent  disparagement  of 
America.  These  writers  were  most  of  them 
Tories  of  the  strictest  sect;  and  they  vented 
their  venom  on  us  month  after  month  in  Black- 
wood's  and  quarter  after  quarter  in  the  Quar- 
terly. 

What  Sydney  Smith  sought  to  accomplish  in 
this  review  of  this  book  was  to  convince  Ameri- 
cans that  this  malignant  torrent  flowed  only 
from  Tory  pens  and  that  it  had  never  disgraced 
the  pages  of  the  Edinburgh  Review.  He  called 
attention  to  the  fact  that  the  Edinburgh  itself 
had  come  in  for  its  portion  of  the  abuse  which 
the  author  of  'An  Appeal'  seemed  "to  think 
reserved  exclusively  for  America, — and,  what 
is  a  little  remarkable,  for  being  too  much  her 
advocate."  He  insisted  that  the  Edinburgh  had 
"spoken  far  more  good  of  America  than  ill — 
that  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten,  where  we  have 
mentioned  her,  it  has  been  for  praise — and  in  all 
92 


THE  CENTENARY  OF  A  QUESTION 

that  is  essential  or  of  serious  importance,  we 
have  spoken  nothing  but  good; — while  our  cen- 
sures have  been  wholly  confined  to  matters  of 
inferior  note,  and  generally  accompanied  with 
an  apology  for  their  existence,  and  a  prediction 
of  their  speedy  disappearance."  He  quoted  a 
passage  from  an  article  in  an  early  number  of 
the  Edinburgh  in  which  the  assertion  was  made 
that  "the  Americans  had  shown  an  abundance 
of  talent,  wherever  inducements  had  been  held 
out  for  its  exertion;  that  their  party  pamphlets 
were  written  with  great  keenness  and  spirit; 
and  that  their  orators  frequently  displayed  a 
vehemence,  correctness  and  animation,  that 
would  win  the  admiration  of  any  European 
audience." 

And  in  his  final  paragraph  he  declared  that 
his  article  may  contain  things  requiring  explana- 
tion and  things  liable  to  misconstruction;  but 
nevertheless  "the  spirit  in  which  it  is  written, 
however,  cannot,  we  think,  be  misunderstood. 
We  cannot  descend  to  little  cavils  and  alterca- 
tions; and  have  no  leisure  to  maintain  a  con- 
troversy about  words  and  phrases.  We  have 
an  unfeigned  respect  for  the  free  people  of 
America;  and  we  mean  honestly  to  pledge  our- 
selves for  that  of  the  better  part  of  this  coun- 
try." Surely  this  is  frank  and  manly  and 
straightforward,  as  Sydney  Smith  was  himself. 

93 


THE  CENTENARY  OF  A   QUESTION 

Surely  there  is  nothing  here  to  offend  the  suscep- 
tibilities of  the  most  sensitive  and  most  thin- 
skinned  of  Americans. 

On  any  unprejudiced  survey  we  must  exon- 
erate Sydney  Smith  and  the  Edinburgh  Review 
of  a  century  ago  from  any  ill  will  toward  the 
United  States  and  from  any  sympathy  with  the 
Tory  attacks  upon  us.  That  these  assaults 
were  incessant  not  only  in  1820,  but  for  the 
following  fifty  years,  all  Americans  are  aware. 
That  they  did  immeasurable  mischief  is  noto- 
rious; and  it  is  also  probable  that  they  were  in 
part  responsible  for  the  occasional  dislike  of 
Great  Britain  which  was  unfortunately  dis- 
closed when  we  at  last  decided  to  enter  the 
Great  War  in  alliance  with  the  nation  with  which 
we  had  waged  the  War  of  Independence  and  the 
War  of  1812.  Bismarck  was  never  shrewder 
than  when  he  pointed  out  that  "  every  country 
is  held  at  some  time  to  account  for  the  windows 
broken  by  its  press;  the  bill  is  presented,  some 
day  or  other,  in  the  form  of  hostile  sentiment  in 
the  other  country."  And  this  hostile  senti- 
ment has  often  proved  itself  to  be  the  most 
potent  of  those  "imponderables"  which  Bis- 
marck always  valued  highly. 

It  is  interesting  to  note  that  Washington 
Irving  had  in  effect  anticipated  this  pregnant 
remark  of  Bismarck's.  In  one  of  the  earliest 

94 


THE   CENTENARY   OF  A   QUESTION 

of  the  numbers  in  which  the  'Sketch-Book* 
began  to  appear  in  1819,  there  is  a  paper  entitled 
'English  Writers  on  America/  which  opens  with 
a  significant  sentence:  "It  is  with  feelings  of  deep 
regret  that  I  observe  the  literary  animosity 
daily  growing  up  between  England  and  Amer- 
ica." That  Irving  himself  had  been  bitterly 
aggrieved  by  the  abuse  lavished  on  the  United 
States  by  the  Quarterly  Review  was  shown  two 
or  three  years  later  after  the  'Sketch-Book '  had 
established  his  reputation;  he  declined  an  offer 
of  a  hundred  pounds  for  a  contribution  to  the 
Quarterly.  He  was  in  sore  need  of  money,  but 
he  felt  that  it  would  be  unworthy  in  him  to 
appear  in  the  pages  of  a  periodical  which  had 
shown  itself  unscrupulously  malignant  toward 
his  country. 

While  the  opening  sentence  of  his  friendly 
essay  is  significant,  as  I  have  pointed  out,  per- 
haps a  later  passage  is  even  more  deserving  of 
quotation  here: 

Possessing,  as  England  does,  the  fountain-head 
whence  the  literature  of  the  language  flows,  how  com- 
pletely is  it  in  her  power,  and  how  truly  is  it  her  duty, 
to  make  it  a  medium  of  amiable  and  magnanimous 
feeling — a  stream  where  the  two  nations  might  meet 
together,  and  drink  in  peace  and  kindness.  Should 
she,  however,  persist  in  turning  it  to  waters  of  bitter- 
ness, the  time  may  come  when  she  may  repent  of  her 
folly.  .  .  .  She  may  look  back  with  regret  at  her 

95 


THE  CENTENARY  OP  A  QUESTION 

infatuation,  in  repulsing  from  her  side  a  nation  she 
might  have  grappled  to  her  bosom,  and  thus  destroying 
her  only  chance  for  real  friendship  beyond  the  bound- 
aries of  her  own  dominion. 

(January,  1920.) 


VI 

AMERICAN   APHORISMS 


VI 

AMERICAN   APHORISMS 


AT  the  beginning  of  an  address  which  Lord 
Morley  delivered  before  the  Edinburgh 
Philosophical  Institute  nearly  thirty  years  ago 
he  told  his  hearers  that  he  had  often  been  asked 
for  a  list  of  the  hundred  best  books  and  that  he 
had  once  been  requested  to  supply  by  return  of 
post  the  names  of  the  three  best  books  in  the 
world.  "Both  the  hundred  and  the  three  are  a 
task  far  too  high  for  me,"  he  confessed,  and  then 
he  declared  that  he  would  prefer  to  indicate 
what  is  "one  of  the  things  best  worth  hunting 
for  in  books," — the  wisdom  which  has  com- 
pacted itself  into  the  proverb,  the  maxim,  the 
aphorism,  the  pregnant  sentence  inspired  by 
* '  common  sense  in  an  uncommon  degree. "  Lord 
Morley  asserted  that  the  essence  of  the  aphorism 
is  "the  compression  of  a  mass  of  thought  and 
observation  into  a  single  saying";  and  he  added 
that  it  ought  "to  be  neither  enigmatical  nor 
flat,  neither  a  truism  on  the  one  hand,  nor  a 
riddle  on  the  other." 

99 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

The  lecturer  did  not  provide  a  definition  of 
the  lofty  aphorism  which  should  serve  to  dis- 
tinguish it  from  the  humbler  proverb;  and  yet 
the  distinction  is  perhaps  contained  in  this  last 
quotation,  since  the  democratic  proverb  tends 
toward  the  truism  whereas  the  more  aristo- 
cratic aphorism  inclines  toward  the  enigma. 
Lord  John  Russell  once  called  a  proverb  "All 
men's  wisdom  and  one  man's  wit";  and  prover- 
bial wisdom  appeals  at  once  to  the  mass  of  man- 
kind, whereas  the  less  universal  truth  packed 
into  the  subtler  aphorism  is  likely  to  demand  a 
little  time  for  consideration  before  it  can  win 
its  welcome.  In  fact,  the  more  keenly  the 
maker  of  an  aphorism  has  peered  into  the  inner 
recesses  of  human  nature,  the  less  likely  is  his 
maxim  to  attain  immediate  acceptance  from 
the  multitude,  who  are  optimistically  content 
to  see  only  the  surface  of  life  and  who  prefer 
not  to  probe  too  deeply  into  the  fundamental 
egotism  of  man.  So  it  is  that  the  swift  appre- 
hension of  some  of  the  shrewdest  of  La  Roche- 
foucauld's sayings  might  almost  be  made  to 
serve  as  a  test  both  of  the  intelligence  and  of  the 
knowledge  of  the  labyrinthian  intricacies  of  the 
human  soul. 

We  may  easily  find  ourselves  quarreling  over 
the  veracity  of  an  aphorism,  whereas  a  proverb 
is  almost  indisputable;  it  proves  itself  as  simply 

ICO 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

and  as  instantly  as  the  assertion  that  two  and 
two  make  four.  This  immediate  obviousness  of 
a  proverb  does  not  prevent  it  from  being  ir- 
reconcilable with  another  proverb  stating  the 
equally  obvious  opposite.  "  Penny- wise  and 
pound-foolish"  may  seem  to  contradict  "take 
care  of  the  pence  and  the  pounds  will  take  care 
of  themselves."  But  after  all  the  contradiction 
is  only  apparent,  since  it  needs  both  of  these 
sayings  to  contain  the  whole  truth  that  we  must 
be  careful  in  little  things,  no  doubt,  but  we  must 
also  be  able  to  discern  boldly  the  moment  when 
little  things  must  be  sacrificed  for  great  things. 
More  than  one  humorist  has  seen  fit  to  poke 
fun  at  this  peculiarity  of  proverbial  wisdom, 
without  any  impairment  of  the  authority  of 
either  of  the  contradictory  assertions. 

The  maxim  we  may  trace  to  its  source  and 
tag  with  the  name  of  its  maker,  but  the  proverb 
is  not  individual  even  if  it  must  have  been 
minted  by  some  one  man.  "Penny- wise  and 
pound-foolish"  might  have  been  uttered  in  any 
age;  and  it  is  only  the  modern  expression  for 
a  rule  of  conduct  inherited  from  the  remotest 
past.  An  equivalent  phrase  must  have  been 
uttered  soon  after  the  development  of  articulate 
speech;  and  we  may  be  assured  that  it  was  al- 
most as  familiar  to  the  cave-dwellers  as  it  is  to 
us.  It  did  not  have  to  be  transmitted  by  in- 
101 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

heritance  from  the  dead  languages  to  the  liv- 
ing; it  sprang  into  being  by  spontaneous  gen- 
eration in  every  tongue,  ancient  and  modern. 
By  the  very  fact  that  it  is  of  universal  validity, 
and  therefore  of  universal  utility,  it  is  to  be 
found  in  every  land,  in  every  language  and  in 
every  age. 

The  maxim,  on  the  other  hand,  is  more  frankly 
individual;  it  is  due  not  to  the  wisdom  of  the 
many  but  only  to  the  penetrating  wit  of  one; 
and  therefore  it  is  often  racial,  revealing  the 
tongue  and  the  tune  of  him  who  first  put  the 
piercing  thought  into  apt  words.  So  it  is  likely 
to  have  local  color,  a  flavor  of  the  soil  in  which  it 
grew.  Some  of  the  aphorisms  of  Confucius  may 
be  universal,  no  doubt,  but  others  and  not  a 
few  of  them,  are  essentially  Chinese.  I  can- 
not help  feeling  that  I  discover  a  Roman  quality 
in  the  saying  of  Marcus  Aurelius,  that  "the 
best  way  to  get  revenge  is  to  avoid  being  like 
the  one  who  has  injured  you."  This  is  not 
only  Roman,  it  seems  to  have  also  an  individual 
liberality  disclosing  a  truly  imperial  mind. 

Many  of  the  maxims  of  the  caustic  La  Roche- 
foucauld are  marked  with  the  time  and  place  of 
their  making, — the  France  of  the  aged  Mazarin 
and  of  the  youthful  Louis  XIV.  When  the 
French  observer  asserted  that  "you  are  never 
so  easily  cheated  as  when  you  are  trying  to 
102 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

cheat  somebody  else,"  he  is  declaring  a  truth 
which  might  have  been  uttered  by  Aristoph- 
anes, by  Moliere  or  by  Mark  Twain,  a  truth 
upon  which  are  established  the  schemes  of  the 
" green  goods"  man  and  the  "gold  brick"  oper- 
ator of  New  York  in  the  twentieth  century; 
but  when  he  tells  us  that  "virtue  would  not  go 
far — if  vanity  did  not  keep  it  company," — there 
we  can  detect  the  Frenchman  of  the  seventeenth 
century.  It  is  true  that  Sainte-Beuve  credits 
La  Rochefoucauld  with  large  imagination, — not 
a  frequent  possession  of  the  French, — finding 
evidence  for  this  in  another  of  these  maxims, — 
"we  cannot  gaze  fixedly  at  the  sun,  or  at  death." 
But  most  of  these  searching  and  scorching  sen- 
tences are  directly  due  to  a  disenchantment 
which  envenoms  La  Rochefoucauld's  scalpel; 
and  this  disenchantment  was  the  result  of  a 
reaction  of  that  social  instinct  which  is  a  pre- 
dominant French  characteristic. 

Of  course,  among  the  mass  of  French  apho- 
risms there  are  a  host  which  lack  local  color. 
When  Madame  de  Boufflers  suggested  that 
"the  only  perfect  people  are  those  we  do  not 
know,"  she  was  making  a  remark  that  might 
have  been  uttered  by  an  Italian — or  even  by  a 
Spaniard.  When  the  Spanish  Gracian  declared 
that  "the  ear  is  the  area-gate  of  truth  but  the 
front-door  of  lies,"  he  was  saying  something 
103 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

that  might  have  been  said  by  an  Englishman  or 
by  a  Roman.  And  when  Bacon  asserted  that 
"extreme  self -lovers  will  set  a  house  on  fire  and 
it  were  but  to  roast  their  eggs,"  the  wording  is 
British  but  the  thought  is  one  that  might  readily 
have  occurred  to  a  Frenchman  and  that  might 
be  easily  paralleled  in  the  pages  of  La  Roche- 
foucauld. 

There  is  little  that  is  significantly  oriental  in 
this  specimen  of  the  wisdom  of  the  East:  "If 
you  censure  your  friend  for  every  fault  he  com- 
mits, there  will  come  a  time  when  you  will  have 
no  friend  to  censure."  A  Frenchman  could 
very  well  have  said  that,  altho  he  might  have 
phrased  it  more  felicitously.  On  the  other  hand, 
many  of  the  sayings  of  Nietzsche  we  could  not 
well  credit  to  an  inquisitor  of  any  other  nation- 
ality or  of  any  other  century.  "There  are  two 
things  a  true  man  likes, — danger  and  play;  and 
he  likes  woman  because  she  is  the  most  danger- 
ous of  playthings."  That  is  one  of  them,  and 
there  is  another:  "All  women  behind  their  per- 
sonal vanity  cherish  an  impersonal  contempt  for 
Woman."  And  yet  even  in  Nietzsche  we  may 
find  now  and  again  a  sentence  which  might  have 
been  set  down  on  the  tablets  of  that  lonely 
stoic,  Marcus  Aurelius:  "A  slave  cannot  be  a 
friend  and  a  tyrant  cannot  have  a  friend." 


104 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 


n 

THE  perennial  commonplaces  of  observation 
are  reincarnated  in  every  generation,  born 
again,  century  after  century  in  every  quarter 
of  the  globe,  since  man  himself  changes  only 
a  little,  even  tho  mankind  has  ever  the  delu- 
sion of  progress.  It  was  an  unknown  but  a 
most  modern  American  who  was  once  moved 
to  the  biting  accusation  against  certain  of  his 
contemporary  countrymen  that  they  sought 
"first,  to  get  on,  then  to  get  honor,  and  finally 
to  get  honest."  Nevertheless  this  bitter  jibe 
had  been  anticipated  by  the  old  Greek  poet, 
Phokylides,  who  expressed  his  wish,  "first  to 
acquire  a  competence,  and  then  to  practise 
virtue."  John  Fiske  once  wrote  an  essay  to 
indicate  a  few  of  the  many  points  of  resem- 
blance between  the  Athenians  of  old  and  the 
Americans  of  today;  and  we  need  not  despair 
of  yet  finding  a  Greek  wit  who  had  already  dwelt 
on  that  disadvantage  of  "swapping  horses  while 
crossing  a  stream,"  which  Lincoln  once  pointed 
out  with  his  customary  shrewdness. 

It  is  perhaps  because  of  their  superior  social 
instinct  that  the  French  are  the  modern  masters 
of  the  maxim,  and  even  if  we  who  speak  English 
are  more  abundant  and  more  adroit  in  aphorism 

105 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

than  those  who  speak  German  or  those  who 
speak  Italian,  we  must  confess  our  constant  in- 
feriority to  those  who  speak  French,  a  language 
that  lends  itself  to  epigram  because  it  has  been 
suppled  to  the  needs  of  a  highly  cultivated 
society  of  the  nation  most  distinguished  for  its 
intelligence  among  the  moderns  as  the  Atheni- 
ans were  among  the  ancients.  And  of  the  two 
peoples  who  have  English  for  their  mother- 
tongue,  we  Americans,  despite  our  superficial 
and  superabundant  loquacity,  seem  to  be  able 
to  achieve  the  sententious  at  least  as  often 
as  the  British.  Lincoln  was  a  master  of  the 
compact  and  pregnant  phrase;  so  was  Emerson 
before  him;  and  so  was  Franklin  a  century 
earlier. 

In  his  autobiography  Franklin  tells  how  he 
utilized  "the  little  spaces  that  occurred  between 
the  remarkable  days"  in  the  almanac  (which 
he  issued  annually  for  twenty-five  years  and 
which  was  the  basis  of  his  own  comfortable 
fortune)  to  contain  "  proverbial  sentences,  chiefly 
such  as  inculcated  industry  and  frugality,  as  the 
means  of  procuring  wealth,  and  thereby  secur- 
ing virtue; — it  being  more  difficult  for  a  man  in 
want  to  act  always  honestly,  as  to  use  here  one 
of  these  proverbs,  'it  is  hard  for  an  empty  sack 
to  stand  upright.'"  Most  of  these  proverbs 
were  borrowed  from  "the  wisdom  of  many  ages 
106 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

and  nations/'  as  Franklin  himself  acknowledges, 
but  not  a  few  of  them  seem  to  be  due  to  his  own 
witty  wisdom;  and  that  just  quoted  appears  to 
be  one  of  these.  Taken  as  a  whole,  the  sayings 
of  Poor  Richard  range  rather  with  the  lowly 
proverb  than  with  the  more  elevated  and  more 
incisive  aphorism;  and  Lord  Morley  chose  to 
dismiss  them  with  curt  contempt  as  "kitchen- 
maxims  about  thrift  in  time  and  money."  Yet 
the  saying  about  the  empty  sack  rises  a  little 
above  the  level  of  the  kitchen-maxim;  and  so 
does  that  other  which  declares  that  "if  you 
would  have  your  business  done,  go;  if  not  send." 
One  of  Franklin's  biographers  records  that  when 
Paul  Jones,  after  his  victory  in  the  "Ranger" 
went  to  Brest  to  await  the  new  ship  which  had 
been  promised  him,  he  was  tormented  for  months 
by  excuses  and  delays  despite  his  appeals  to 
Franklin,  to  the  royal  family  and  to  the  king 
himself.  Then  at  last  he  chanced  to  pick  up 
'Poor  Richard/  and  the  saying  just  quoted  hit 
home.  He  took  the  hint,  "hurried  to  Ver- 
sailles, and  there  got  an  order  for  the  ship  which 
he  renamed  in  honor  of  his  teacher,  the  'Bon- 
homme  Richard.7" 

Emerson  gives  us  "golden  nuggets  of  thought," 

so  Mr.  Brownell  suggests;  but  he  does  not  mold 

them  into  beads  and  link  them  into  necklaces. 

His  essays  lack  unity,  except  that  of  theme  and 

107 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

of  tone;  and  his  sentences  are,  as  he  himself  con- 
fessed, "infinitely  repellent  particles."  No  one 
of  his  essays  is  artistically  composed  and  almost 
every  one  of  his  sentences  is  sufficient  unto  it- 
self, with  a  careful  adroitness  of  composition  of 
which  he  alone  in  his  time  had  the  secret.  He 
is  master  of  the  winged  phrase,  barbed  to  flesh 
itself  in  the  memory.  In  his  sentence  there  is 
not  only  meat,  but  meat  dressed  to  perfection, 
cooked  to  a  turn,  and  not  lacking  sauce.  "No 
writer  ever  possessed  a  more  distinguished 
verbal  instinct,  or  indulged  it  with  more  de- 
light,"— to  quote  again  from  Mr.  Brownell; 
Emerson  "fairly  caresses  his  words  and  phrases 
and  shows  in  his  treatment  of  them  a  pleasure 
nearer  sensuousness,  perhaps,  than  any  other 
he  manifests." 

None  the  less  is  it  difficult  to  detach  from  his 
pages  the  exact  maxim  as  we  find  it  in  Bacon 
and  La  Rochefoucauld  and  Vauvenargues. 
Emerson's  thoughts  are  elevated  and  often  sub- 
tle, but  only  rarely  do  they  fall  precisely  into 
the  form  of  the  aphorism.  He  tells  us  that  "  the 
man  in  the  street  does  not  know  a  star  in  the 
sky"; — but  that  is  not  quite  a  maxim,  even  if 
it  escapes  being  a  truism.  He  asserts  that  "it 
is  as  impossible  for  a  man  to  be  cheated  by  any 
one  but  himself,  as  for  a  thing  to  be  and  not  to 
be  at  the  same  time"; — but  that  can  hardly  be 
108 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

called  an  aphorism,  wise  as  it  is  and  incisive. 
Perhaps  the  explanation  lies  in  the  fact  that 
Emerson  is  wholly  devoid  of  malice, — the  malice 
that  edges  La  Rochefoucauld's  shafts  to  sting 
themselves  into  our  consciousness.  Emerson 
has  few  delusions  about  the  ultimate  infirmities 
of  mankind,  but  he  is  never  malevolent.  He  is 
clear-eyed,  beyond  all  question,  and  yet  he  re- 
mains optimistic.  In  most  maxim-makers  there 
is  a  spice  of  ill-will,  a  taint  of  hostile  contempt; 
and  Emerson  is  ever  free  from  ill-will,  from  con- 
tempt and  from  hostility. 

Ill 

IN  no  department  of  the  American  branch  of 
English  literature  is  our  benevolent  optimism 
more  pervadingly  manifested  than  in  our  humor. 
American  humor  is  likely  to  be  good  humor; 
even  our  satires  are  not  cruelly  savage,  and  our 
epigrams  rarely  have  a  poisoned  dart  at  the  tail 
of  them.  Our  unquenchable  friendliness  has  pre- 
vented most  native  fun-makers  from  focussing 
their  gaze  on  the  meaner  possibilities  of  selfish 
egotism.  It  is  not  a  little  surprizing  therefore 
that  the  largest  and  most  liberally  endowed  of 
our  later  humorists,  Mark  Twain,  should  have 
taken  to  the  making  of  maxims  as  disenchanted 
as  those  of  Marcus  Aurelius,  altho  not  more 
109 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

acrid  than  those  of  La  Rochefoucauld.  It  was 
toward  the  end  of  his  career,  when  he  stood 
pleasantly  conspicuous  on  the  pinnacle  of  his 
fame,  abundantly  belauded  and  sincerely  be- 
loved, that  his  indurated  sadness,  his  total  dis- 
satisfaction with  life,  found  relief  in  chiseled 
sentences  to  be  set  beside  the  sayings  of  Epic- 
tetus. 

Consider  this : "  Whoever  has  lived  long  enough 
to  find  out  what  life  is,  knows  how  deep  a  debt 
of  gratitude  we  owe  to  Adam,  the  first  bene- 
factor of  our  race; — he  brought  death  into  the 
world."  Note  how  the  same  thought  is  brought 
forward  again  in  this:  "Why  is  it  that  we  re- 
joice at  a  birth  and  grieve  at  a  funeral?  It  is 
because  we  are  not  the  person  involved."  And 
yet  another  twist  is  given  to  this  same  thought 
in  a  third  saying:  "All  say,  'How  hard  it  is 
that  we  have  to  die/ — a  strange  complaint  to 
come  from  the  mouths  of  people  who  have  had 
to  live." 

Those  who  knew  Mark  Twain  intimately  were 
well  aware  of  the  despairing  sadness  that  dark- 
ened his  last  years.  He  was  wont  to  don  the 
cap  and  bells  to  appear  before  the  public;  but 
in  private,  or  at  least  when  he  was  alone  and 
lonely  he  sat  in  sackcloth  and  ashes.  He  had 
always  had  the  melancholy  which  is  likely  to 
underlie  and  to  sustain  robust  humor,  and  his 
no 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

melancholy  was  even  more  intense  and  more 
astringent  than  that  of  Cervantes  or  Moliere, — 
altho  either  of  these  might  well  have  anticipated 
this  saving  of  their  belated  brother  in  fun- 
making:  "The  man  who  is  a  pessimist  before 
he  is  forty-eight  knows  too  much;  the  man  who 
is  an  optimist  after  he  is  forty-eight  knows  too 
little."  But  it  may  be  doubted  whether  either 
die  Spaniard  or  the  Frenchman  would  have 
penned  the  assertion  that  "if  you  pick  up  a 
starving  dog  and  make  him  prosperous,  he 
will  not  bite  you: — this  is  the  principal  differ- 
ence between  a  dog  and  a  man."  Here  we 
discover  not  mere  pessimism  but  stark  mis- 
anthropy. There  is  a  sounder  philosophy  in 
another  of  his  sayings:  "Grief  can  take  care  of 
itself,  but  to  get  the  full  value  of  a  joy  you 
must  have  some  one  to  share  it  with." 

Quite  possibly  a  majority  of  casual  readers, 
finding  these  dark  sayings  scattered  thru  the 
bright  pages  of  a  professional  funny-man,  did  not 
feel  called  upon  to  take  them  seriously  and  might 
even  have  accepted  them  as  merely  humorous 
over-statements  intended  to  provoke  laughter  by 
their  evident  exaggeration.  Those  casual  read- 
ers may  have  discovered  no  essential  difference 
between  the  annihilating  blankness  of  the  opin- 
ions just  quoted  and  utterances  avowedly 
caustic, — such  as  the  assertion  that  "one  of  the 
in 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

most  striking  differences  between  a  cat  and  a 
lie  is  that  a  cat  has  only  nine  lives."  Yet  even 
in  this  saying  the  playfulness  serves  only  to  hide 
from  the  hasty  the  solemn  warning  it  disguises. 

IV 

IT  is  the  mark  of  the  superior  humorist  that 
he  arouses  thought  as  well  as  laughter;  and 
George  Meredith  held  this  to  be  the  test  of  true 
comedy  of  the  loftier  type.  Many  a  wise  man 
has  worn  motley  that  he  might  win  a  smiling 
welcome  for  his  message.  When  Josh  Billings 
was  amusing  us  with  his  acrobatic  orthography, 
a  critic  in  one  of  the  literary  reviews  of  London 
was  sharp  enough  to  see  that  the  misfit  spelling 
was  only  an  eccentric  costume  put  on  to  com- 
pel attention,  like  the  towering  plumes  of  the 
quack  doctor's  hat;  and  this  critic,  by  stripping 
off  this  incongruous  cloak,  borrowed  by  Josh 
Billings  from  Artemus  Ward,  removed  him  from 
the  company  of  the  mere  newspaper  jest-manu- 
facturers and  promoted  him  to  the  upper  class 
of  more  penetrating  maxim-makers.  Professor 
Bliss  Perry  recently  remarked  that  the  tone  of 
many  of  the  apothegms  of  Josh  Billings  is  really 
grave  and  that  often  the  moralizing  might  be 
by  La  Bruyere. 

To  the  Josh  Billings  who  frankly  fellowships 
112 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

with  Artemus  Ward  we  may  credit  this  para- 
graph: "There  iz  two  things  in  this  life  for  which 
we  are  never  fully  prepared,  and  that  iz  twins, " 
— a  bold  whimsical  absurdity,  which  has  served 
its  purpose  when  it  provokes  the  guffaw  it  aims 
to  excite.  But  it  is  to  the  shrewd  observer  who 
is  to  be  companied  with  La  Bruyere  that  we 
must  ascribe  the  statement, — here  deprived  of 
its  undignified  disguise  of  queer  orthography, — 
that  "when  a  fellow  gets  going  down  hill,  it 
does  seem  as  tho  everything  had  been  greased 
for  the  occasion."  That  is  an  echo  from  Greek 
philosophy;  and  here  is  another  saying,  in  which 
Professor  Perry  finds  the  perfect  tone  of  the 
great  French  moralists:  "It  is  a  very  delicate 
job  to  forgive  a  man  without  lowering  him  in 
his  own  estimation,  and  in  yours  too."  Per- 
haps it  may  be  well  to  cite  a  third  equally  felici- 
tous in  its  phrasing  and  equally  acute  in  its  con- 
tent: "Life  is  short,  but  it  is  long  enough  to 
ruin  any  man  who  wants  to  be  ruined."  These 
are  all  assertions  of  universal  veracity, — even 
tho  they  lack  any  specific  American  tang. 

Local  color  is  lacking  also  in  the  motto  Wash- 
ington Allston  had  painted  on  the  wall  of  his 
studio:  "Selfishness  in  art,  as  in  other  things,  is 
sensibility  kept  at  home."  It  is  absent  also 
from  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich's  declaration  that 
"a  man  is  known  by  the  company  his  mind 

"3 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

keeps."    And  it  is  wanting  again  in  John  Hay's 
distich: 

There  are  three  species  of  creatures  who  when  they 

seem  to  be  coming  are  going, 
When  they  seem  to  be  going  they  come;  diplomats, 

women  and  crabs. 

By  the  side  of  these  may  be  set  two  of  Mr.  E. 
W.  Howe's  'Country  Town  Sayings/— " When 
a  man  tries  himself,  the  verdict  is  usually  in  his 
favor";  and  "Every  one  hates  a  martyr;  it's  no 
wonder  martyrs  were  burned  at  the  stake." 
Yet  even  in  these  remarks  from  the  rural  West, 
there  is  but  little  flavor  of  the  soil.  Perhaps  this 
American  savor  can  be  detected  a  little  more 
plainly  in  three  of  the  sayings  which  Mr.  Kin 
Hubbard  credits  to  his  creature,  Abe  Martin, 
and  which  he  endows  with  the  unpremeditated 
ease  of  the  spoken  word.  One  of  them  is  to  the 
effect  that  "nobuddy  works  as  hard  for  his 
money  as  the  feller  that  marries  it."  Another 
calls  attention  to  the  fact  that  "nobuddy  ever 
listened  t'  reason  on  an  empty  stomach."  And 
a  third  asserts  that  "folks  that  blurt  out  jist 
what  they  think  wouldn't  be  so  bad  if  they 
thought." 

There  is  a  homely  directness  about  these 
rustic  apothegms  which  makes  them  far  more 
palatable  than  the  strained  and  sophisticated 
114 


AMERICAN  APHORISMS 

epigrams  of  the  characters  of  Oscar  Wilde's 
plays  who  are  ever  striving  strenuously  to  dazzle 
us  with  verbal  pyrotechnics.  The  labored  con- 
tortions of  the  London  jester  seem  to  have 
a  thin  crackle  when  we  compare  them  with 
these  examples  of  rustic  shrewdness  sprouting 
spontaneously  on  the  prairies.  And  in  the 
aphorism,  as  in  every  other  kind  of  literature, 
the  fact  is  more  important  than  the  form,  the 
content  is  more  significant  than  the  container. 

(1915.) 


VII 

A   PLEA   FOR   THE   PLATITUDE 


VII 
A   PLEA   FOR   THE   PLATITUDE 


IT  is  greatly  to  be  regretted  that  we  do  not 
know  the  name  of  the  man  who  boldly  de- 
clared that  "  Grover  Cleveland  was  the  greatest 
master  of  platitude  since  George  Washington." 
It  would  be  amusing  to  inquire  whether  he  meant 
this  for  a  compliment  to  Cleveland  or  for  a  re- 
proof to  Washington.  It  would  be  interesting  to 
ask  him  also  whether  he  was  prepared  to  concede 
that  a  practical  politician  at  the  head  of  the 
commonwealth  ought  to  be  a  master  of  plati- 
tude. If  the  unknown  utterer  of  this  pregnant 
saying  was  willing  to  admit  this,  he  would  find 
himself  in  the  comfortable  company  of  that 
shrewd  student  of  affairs,  Walter  Bagehot,  who 
held  that  a  statesman  was  likely  to  be  most 
useful  to  the  community  when  he  combined 
common  ideas  and  uncommon  ability. 

One  of  Cleveland's  more  recent  successors  in 
the  presidency  of  the  United  States  was  ac- 
cused of  talking  about  the  Ten  Commandments 
just  as  if  he  had  received  them  as  a  direct  per- 
119 


A  PLEA  FOR  THE  PLATITUDE 

sonal  revelation  to  himself.  Now,  there  is  no 
denying  that  Theodore  Roosevelt  was  wont  to 
talk  in  this  fashion.  And  why  not?  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  the  Ten  Commandments  had 
come  to  him  as  a  direct  personal  revelation — 
for  so  they  must  come  to  every  one  of  us  who 
is  ready  to  receive  them  and  to  take  them  to 
heart.  In  the  case  of  Roosevelt,  as  in  the  case 
of  Washington  and  Cleveland,  that  which  was 
foolishly  meant  as  a  reproof  turns  out  to  be 
really  a  compliment.  There  can  be  no  more 
imperative  duty  for  the  chief  of  state  in  a  demo- 
cratic republic  than  to  reiterate  the  eternal  veri- 
ties. It  is  his  privilege  also  to  profit  by  the 
megaphone  which  destiny  has  put  at  his  lips  to 
cry  aloud  these  imperishable  truths  and  thus  to 
force  them  upon  ears  that  might  otherwise  re- 
fuse to  listen.  It  may  be  charged  that  when  a 
leader  of  men  is  insistent  in  asserting  again  and 
again  that  honesty  is  the  best  policy,  he  is  low- 
ering himself  to  the  inculcation  of  the  obvious. 
But  if  this  is  just  what  he  believes  to  be  need- 
ful at  the  moment,  he  has  no  right  to  shrink 
from  saying  once  again  what  many  have  asserted 
before  him.  Stevenson  hit  the  center  when  he 
suggested  that  "  after  all,  the  commonplaces  are 
the  great  poetic  truths." 

Perhaps  there  is  small  risk  in  declaring  that 
we  Americans  have  a  lust  for  novel  ideas  and 
120 


A  PLEA  FOR   THE  PLATITUDE 

that  we  listen  with  jaded  credulity  to  those  who 
get  up  in  the  market-place  to  proclaim  a  new 
gospel.  Yet  we  are  all  aware  that  what  is  new 
is  not  likely  to  be  true  and  that  what  is  true  is 
likely  to  be  old.  We  all  know  this,  and  yet 
we  are  often  impatient  with  those  old  fogies 
who  abide  by  the  ancient  land-marks.  We  are 
prone  to  laugh  at  the  mossbacks  brave  enough 
to  risk  the  reproach  brought  against  the  katy- 
did,— which  has  the  habit  of  saying  "an  undis- 
puted thing  in  such  a  solemn  way."  The  un- 
disputed things  are  always  in  danger  of  being 
neglected;  and  they  need  to  be  said  afresh  to 
every  generation,  in  the  special  vocabulary  of 
that  generation  and  with  whatever  of  solemnity 
we  can  command.  The  wisdom  of  the  fathers 
must  be  restated  for  the  benefit  of  the  children, 
and  yet  again  for  the  guidance  of  the  grand- 
children. 

Just  as  it  is  a  certain  evidence  of  juvenility 
to  shriek  out  an  accusation  of  plagiarism  when- 
ever two  plays  happen  to  have  a  casual  resem- 
blance of  situation  or  whenever  two  poems 
chance  to  have  a  superficial  identity  of  phrase 
or  of  cadence,  so  it  is  an  assured  sign  of  imma- 
turity to  sneer  at  the  political  leader  who  re- 
asserts the  principles  which  he  deems  perma- 
nent and  essential  for  the  common  weal  and  to 
scoff  at  him  as  a  dealer  in  platitudes  and  as 
121 


A  PLEA  FOR  THE  PLATITUDE 

an  expounder  of  commonplaces.  "Common- 
place," said  Lord  Morley  (in  words  that  sound 
almost  like  an  echo  of  Stevenson's),  "after  all, 
is  exactly  what  contains  the  truths  which  are 
indispensable." 

The  brief  speech  which  Lincoln  delivered  at 
Gettysburg  nearly  sixty  years  ago  is  now  ac- 
cepted as  one  of  the  masterpieces  of  English 
prose,  withstanding  comparison  with  the  ad- 
dress on  a  similar  occasion  that  Thucydides  put 
into  the  mouth  of  Pericles.  It  is  as  perfect  in 
its  lofty  dignity  of  sentiment  as  it  is  in  its  lapi- 
dary concision  of  style.  But  there  would  be 
little  difficulty  in  proving  that  it  contains  noth- 
ing new,  since  the  thoughts  that  sustain  it  are 
as  self-evident  as  they  are  sincere.  They  are 
the  ancient  thoughts  which  demanded  to  be 
voiced  again,  then  and  there.  The  stones  of 
this  sublime  structure  are  commonplaces,  recog- 
nized as  such  long  before  Lincoln  was  born, 
long  before  Columbus  set  sail  on  the  Western 
Ocean.  These  well-worn  blocks  Lincoln  chose 
for  his  own  use  with  his  unerring  tact;  and  he 
cemented  them  together  once  again  by  his  own 
personality. 

Hamlet's  soliloquy,  "To  be  or  not  to  be,"  is 

a  mosaic  of  sentiments  and  of  opinions  familiar 

to  every  one  of  us  from  our  youth  up  and  already 

phrased  in  all  sorts  of  fashions  in  every  tongue, 

122 


A  PLEA  FOR  THE  PLATITUDE 

living  or  dead;  —  nevertheless  that  monolog, 
compounded  as  it  may  be  of  commonplaces, 
bereft  of  all  novelty,  glows  and  burns  with  the 
inner  fire  of  Hamlet's  soul  at  that  awful  crisis 
of  his  fate.  It  propounds,  once  for  all,  the 
mighty  questions  we  cannot  help  putting  to 
ourselves  when  we  also  find  ourselves  in  the 
valley  of  the  shadow.  And  when  the  time 
comes  for  any  one  of  us  to  face  those  questions 
we  shall  not  cavil  at  their  antiquity,  for  then 
they  will  erect  themselves  in  front  of  us  with  a 
new-born  challenge. 

II 

IT  may  be  acknowledged  frankly  that  the 
Gettysburg  speech  and  Hamlet's  soliloquy  are 
extreme  cases.  The  savor  of  a  stimulating  indi- 
viduality is  likely  to  be  lacking  from  composi- 
tions as  fundamentally  unoriginal  as  these  two 
are  seen  to  be  when  they  are  reduced  to  their 
elements.  A  commonplace  is  effective  and 
therefore  not  merely  to  be  pardoned  but  even 
to  be  praised,  only  when  it  is  a  personal  redis- 
covery of  the  speaker,  when  he  unhesitatingly 
believes  himself  to  be  speaking  out  of  the  ful- 
ness of  his  own  feeling.  At  the  moment  he 
may  not  know,  and  he  surely  does  not  care, 
whether  or  not  the  things  he  is  called  upon  to 
123 


A  PLEA  FOR  THE  PLATITUDE 

speak  have  ever  been  uttered  before;  and  he  is 
well  aware  that  this  does  not  matter  at  all, 
since  these  things  have  come  to  him  fresh  from 
his  own  experience,  hot  from  his  own  heart. 
Then  the  platitude  is  redeemed  and  transfig- 
ured by  poignant  personality, — as  when  the 
fabled  Scotchman  asseverated  earnestly  that 
"Honesty  is  the  best  policy,"  adding  by  way  of 
explanation,  "I  hae  tried  baith."  What  can 
be  more  commonplace  than  "honesty  is  the 
best  policy"?  It  is  the  tritest  of  truisms,  but 
it  came  to  the  mouth  of  that  man  from  the 
depth  of  his  own  soul.  He  had  no  doubt  but 
that  he  was  lighting  a  torch  for  the  feet  of  those 
who  wander  in  darkness. 

Deprive  commonplace  of  this  note  of  redis- 
covery, by  which  the  old  is  made  new  of  its 
own  accord,  and  it  is  the  abomination  of  deso- 
lation. A  sequence  of  platitudes  peddled  from 
a  platform  by  an  uninspired  speaker  who  re- 
fuses to  rely  on  his  actual  feelings,  who  never 
had  an  idea  of  his  own  and  who  is  seeking  to 
say  only  what  nobody  will  dispute, — this  cannot 
fail  to  be  stale,  flat  and  unprofitable,  even  if 
every  single  commonplace  of  which  it  is  com- 
pacted may  contain  an  immitigable  truth.  It 
is  the  prevalence  of  speechmaking  of  this  sort, 
so  threadbare  and  so  colorless  that  it  seems  in- 
sincere, which  revolts  those  who  demand  that 
124 


A  PLEA  FOR  THE  PLATITUDE 

a  man  shall  reveal  some  evidence  either  of  emo- 
tion or  of  cerebration  before  they  will  listen  to 
him.  This  attitude  is  natural  enough,  but  it 
brings  with  it  a  double  danger.  First  of  all,  it 
tempts  us  to  disregard  the  truth  which  may 
be  clothed  in  the  most  offensively  insipid  com- 
monplace; and  second,  it  allures  us  into  the 
primrose  path  of  paradox. 

The  commonplace  is  not  always  to  be  ac- 
cepted at  its  face  value.  It  may  not  be  true 
now,  whatever  it  has  been  once  upon  a  time; 
and  it  may  even  never  have  been  true,  but  only 
plausible  and  specious.  There  is  no  virtue  in 
the  commonplace  itself,  and  there  may  be  vice 
in  it.  Its  value  resides  wholly  in  the  truth 
which  it  may  contain  and  which  each  of  us 
must  appraise  for  himself.  But  as  the  truth  is 
not  necessarily  inherent  in  a  platitude,  neither 
is  it  necessarily  inherent  in  a  paradox.  Even 
Mr.  Shaw  and  Mr.  Chesterton,  if  pushed  to  the 
wall,  would  probably  be  willing  to  admit  that 
there  are  some  paradoxes  which  are  not  true. 
They  might  be  ready  even  to  accept  the  defini- 
tion of  a  paradox  as  a  truth  serving  its  appren- 
ticeship. 

That  is  what  a  paradox  may  be,  no  doubt; 
it  may  be  a  peremptory  challenge  to  a  common- 
place which  has  ceased  to  sheathe  the  verity, 
even  if  it  has  not  yet  worn  out  its  welcome. 

125 


A  PLEA  FOR  THE  PLATITUDE 

The  paradox  of  this  quality,  however,  is  not 
really  a  paradox;  it  is  only  a  pseudo-paradox; 
it  is  a  new  shape  of  truth ;  and  by  that  very  fact 
it  is  condemned  to  become  a  commonplace  in 
its  turn,  whenever  it  shall  have  ousted  the 
platitude  it  is  attacking.  This  pseudo-paradox, 
which  sooner  or  later  will  inevitably  issue  from 
unthinking  lips  as  an  impregnable  platitude,  is 
never  merely  a  commonplace  reversed.  To  turn 
a  truth  upside  down  is  not  to  turn  it  inside  out. 
To  stand  a  truism  on  its  head  is  profitless;  and 
there  is  no  stimulus  to  clear  thought  in  the  glib 
suggestion  that  "Dishonesty  is  the  best  policy" 
or  that " procrastination  is  the  guardian  of  time." 
An  infelicity  of  phrasemaking  like  this  may  have 
an  evanescent  glitter,  yet  it  is  but  the  flickering 
of  thorns  under  a  pot.  It  may  amuse  babes 
and  sucklings  for  a  little  season  to  be  told  that 
the  devil  is  not  as  black  as  he  is  painted,  since 
he  possesses  at  least  the  Christian  virtue  of  per- 
severance. Verbal  fireworks  are  attractive  only 
to  the  very  young.  The  writer  whose  pages 
corruscate  with  unexpected  inversions  of  ac- 
cepted beliefs  and  who  exhibits  himself  as  a 
catherine-wheel  of  multicolored  paradox  is  likely 
soon  to  sputter  out  in  darkness  and  in  silence. 
If  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  has  any  abiding  value  as 
a  stimulating  thinker  this  is  in  spite  of  his  flam- 
boyant method  of  expressing  himself  and  not 
because  of  it. 

126 


A  PLEA  FOR  THE  PLATITUDE 

A  French  critic  has  asserted  that  men  may 
be  grouped  in  three  classes,  so  far  as  their  atti- 
tude toward  the  truth  is  concerned.  First  of 
all,  there  is  the  immense  majority  assured  that 
the  wisdom  of  the  past  will  be  the  wisdom  of  the 
future  and  glad  always  to  hear  again  the  ac- 
cepted commonplaces.  Second,  there  is  a  youth- 
ful minority,  weary  of  these  traditional  state- 
ments and  avidly  relishing  any  paradox  which 
seems  to  pierce  the  crust  of  convention.  Third, 
there  is  the  little  knot  of  those  who  are  in  the 
habit  of  doing  their  own  thinking  and  who  are 
ever  ready  to  receive  a  novel  idea  on  probation, 
to  weigh  it  cautiously  and  to  test  it  thoroly 
with  willingness  to  accept  it  ultimately  and  to 
make  it  their  own  thereafter  if  it  approves  it- 
self. It  is  from  this  small  company  that  new 
ideas  come  into  being,  and  get  into  circulation. 
The  members  of  this  third  group  have  to  be 
won  over  before  any  novelty  has  a  valid  chance 
of  acceptance;  and  when  at  last  they  have  been 
taken  captive,  the  members  of  the  first  group 
will  slowly,  very  slowly,  and  after  violent  op- 
position, follow  in  their  wake.  The  chosen  few 
carry  the  flag  to  the  front;  and  trailing  after 
them  comes  the  immense  majority  which  gives 
solidity  to  the  body  politic,  changing  its  mind 
only  by  almost  imperceptible  degrees.  And  the 
second  group,  the  youthful  minority,  with  its 
delight  in  disintegrating  paradox,  is  almost 
127 


A  PLEA  FOR  THE  PLATITUDE 

negligible,  because  it  lacks  intellectual  sincerity. 
Its  puerile  protests  against  the  platitudes  which 
buttress  the  social  organization  merely  irritate 
the  immense  majority,  while  they  evoke  only 
tolerant  contempt  from  wiser  men.  The  youth- 
ful minority  is  puffed  up  with  pride  at  its 
discovery  that  elementary  truths  are  common- 
place. But  bread  and  beef  are  the  common- 
places of  diet,  none  the  less  wholesome,  and  in- 
deed none  the  less  welcome,  because  they  lack 
the  spice  of  novelty.  Man  cannot  live  by  para- 
dox alone.  If  the  staff  of  life  chances  to  be 
contained  in  any  paradox,  then  this  is  not  a 
true  paradox  and  then  also  it  is  on  the  way  in 
its  turn  to  become  a  platitude.  It  was  Boileau 
who  remarked  that  "a  new  thought  is  a  thought 
which  must  have  come  to  many  but  which  some 
one  happens  first  to  express,"  and  this  is  per- 
haps the  source  of  Pope's  "  What  oft  was  thought, 
but  ne'er  so  well  expressed."  If  we  insist  on 
escaping  from  the  fenced  field  of  the  common- 
place, we  cannot  complain  if  we  find  ourselves 
landing  in  the  thorny  hedge  of  freakish  unreason. 

(1914.) 


128 


VIII 

ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S 
NOSE 


VIII 

ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S 

NOSE 


ONE  of  the  best  known  and  most  frequently 
quoted  of  the  ' Thoughts'  of  Pascal  calls 
attention  to  the  way  in  which  a  little  thing  may 
have  great  consequences.  "He  who  wants  a 
full  understanding  of  the  vanity  of  man  has 
only  to  consider  the  causes  and  the  effects  of 
love.  The  cause  is  'I  know  not  what';  and  the 
consequences  of  it  are  frightful.  This  'I  know 
not  what*  so  trivial  that  it  can  scarcely  be 
recognized,  moves  all  mankind, — kings  and 
armies  and  the  entire  social  organization.  The 
nose  of  Cleopatra, — if  it  had  been  shorter,  the 
history  of  the  world  would  have  been  changed." 
Altho  Cleopatra  was  the  Serpent  of  the  Old 
Nile  she  was  not  an  Egyptian  but  a  Greek;  she 
was  a  hyphenated  queen, — which  is  what  queens 
usually  are.  Even  if  Mahaffy  was  right  in 
holding  that  the  Greeks  were  not  really  so  su- 
perior to  us  in  physical  beauty  as  the  surviving 
statues  might  lead  us  to  believe,  she  may  have 
had  more  than  her  share  of  the  good  looks  which 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

must  have  been  not  uncommon  among  the  Hel- 
lenic peoples.  As  she  was  a  Greek  she  probably 
did  not  have  a  Roman  nose;  indeed  her  nose 
may  have  been  "tip-tilted  like  the  petal  of  a 
flower,"  which  would  not  have  diminished  her 
fascination.  But  whatever  the  shape  or  the 
length  of  her  nose,  Pascal  is  justified  in  believing 
that  if  it  had  been  unduly  short  she  would  prob- 
ably not  have  descended  the  corridors  of  time 
as  the  heroine  of  the  most  disastrous  of  historic 
love-stories.  She  might  then  have  floated  down 
the  river  in  her  glittering  barge  without  finding 
Mark  Antony  at  her  feet  when  she  stepped 
ashore. 

If  Mark  Antony  had  escaped  the  coils  of  the 
Egyptian  serpent,  he  might  not  have  lost  the 
battle  of  Actium;  and  if  he  had  vanquished  the 
young  Octavius,  Mark  Antony  might  have  been 
the  founder  of  the  Roman  Empire.  But  Mark 
Antony  was  unfitted  for  the  appalling  task  of 
solidifying  a  realm  on  the  verge  of  wreck.  He 
was  too  impetuous  and  too  fickle,  too  emotional 
and  too  uncertain.  He  lacked  the  self-restraint, 
the  caution  and  the  astute  statecraft  of  the  Au- 
gustus who  laid  solid  the  foundations  of  Rome's 
imperial  grandeur.  Even  if  Mark  Antony  had 
made  himself  master  of  the  Mediterranean 
lands,  and  if  he  had  ruled  as  long  as  he  lived, 
it  is  unlikely  that  he  would  have  governed 
132 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

wisely;  and  after  his  death,  chaos  would  have 
come  again.  The  empire  would  not  have  been 
skilfully  buttressed  and  its  outlying  territories 
would  not  have  been  unified  with  Rome  and 
grateful  for  the  three  centuries  of  assured  pros- 
perity which  followed  the  advent  of  Augustus. 
When  the  time  was  fulfilled,  the  gates  of  the 
empire  would  not  have  been  guarded  and  the 
barbarians  would  have  broken  in.  There  would 
have  followed  swift  disintegration  and  destruc- 
tion; and  there  would  have  been  no  lingering 
Decline  and  no  long  deferred  Fall  for  Gibbon  to 
chronicle  and  to  illuminate.  Then  we  moderns 
would  not  have  come  into  the  heritage  upon 
which  our  civilization  is  based. 

It  is  very  lucky  for  us  today  that  the  nose  of 
Cleopatra  was  of  a  normal  length  and  that  the 
frightful  consequences  of  its  possible  abbrevia- 
tion were  avoided.  If  it  had  been  shorter,  it 
would  have  changed  not  only  her  face  but  the 
face  of  the  world  in  this  twentieth  century.  Yet 
I  may  venture  to  hint  a  doubt  whether  Cleo- 
patra's nose  or  Cleopatra  herself,  had  really  the 
immense  importance  that  Pascal  asserted.  It 
is  true  that  the  captivating  queen  of  Egypt  was 
Antony's  evil  genius  and  that  she  was  respon- 
sible for  his  ignominious  defeat.  But  if  we  look 
a  little  longer  and  a  little  deeper,  we  are  likely 
to  conclude  that  Antony's  fatal  weakness  was  in 

133 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

himself,  in  his  unstable  character,  in  his  lawless 
and  lustful  temperament.  If  he  had  never  laid 
eyes  on  Cleopatra,  the  ultimate  result  might 
well  have  been  the  same.  She  was  not  the  only 
charmer  of  her  time,  even  if  she  might  be  the 
most  dangerous.  There  were  others;  and  any 
one  of  them  could  have  lured  the  unstable 
Roman  to  his  allotted  doom. 

More  than  one  later  writer  has  applied  Pas- 
cal's thought  to  other  historical  events.  Among 
them  was  Eugene  Scribe,  most  adroit  of  play- 
wrights even  if  he  was  devoid  of  the  ample 
vision  of  the  more  richly  endowed  dramatists. 
One  of  his  most  ambitious  and  most  ingenious 
comedies  is  'A  Glass  of  Water;  or  Great  Effects 
from  Little  Causes.'  It  dealt  not  with  Queen 
Cleopatra  of  Egypt  but  with  Queen  Anne  of 
England;  and  it  aroused  the  ire  of  Thackeray, 
who  was  in  Paris  when  it  was  originally  pre- 
sented in  1840.  Thackeray  was  then  only  a 
hard-working  journalist  contributing  to  a  heter- 
ogeny  of  magazines.  He  took  this  play  of 
Scribe's  as  the  text  for  a  paper  on  'English  His- 
tory and  Character  on  the  French  Stage.'  He 
expressed  his  disapproval  of  Scribe's  assumption 
that  "the  historical  trophies  of  England  are 
generally  the  result  of  some  mean  accident, 
which  entirely  strips  them  of  their  ideal  glory." 

After  analyzing  the  French  piece,  the  English 

134 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

critic  asserted  that  Scribe  was  "wrong  in  his 
general  principle,"  since  "trivial  circumstances 
are  in  this  life  pretexts,  not  causes,  for  breach 
of  long  established  connections."  They  are 
"the  readily  available  facts  which  discover  the 
depth  of  an  existing  difference;  they  are  seized 
to  decide  an  already  impending  rupture."  In 
other  words,  the  little  thing  which  sometimes 
seems  so  significant  is  only  what  the  physicians 
call  an  exciting  cause,  always  far  less  important 
than  what  they  term  a  predisposing  condition. 
The  last  straw  does  not  break  the  camel's  back 
unless  that  patient  beast  is  already  laden  to  the 
limit  of  endurance.  The  slight  pressure  on  the 
hair-trigger  which  fires  the  gun,  did  not  load 
the  weapon  or  aim  it. 

n 

BUT  even  if  little  things  are  unlikely  to  have 
great  consequences,  there  are  often  remote 
causes  not  immediately  apparent  to  those  who 
contemplate  their  ultimate  results.  I  remem- 
ber a  whimsical  suggestion  in  a  book  by  one  of 
Darwin's  disciples — altho  I  cannot  now  recap- 
ture the  title  of  the  volume  or  the  name  of  its 
author — to  the  effect  that  the  sturdy  stanchness 
of  the  British  army,  the  stubborn  resistance  of 
the  "thin,  red  line"  was  due  to  the  prevalence 

135 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

of  spins terhood  in  Great  Britain,  to  the  fact  that 
the  women  outnumber  the  men.  The  explana- 
tion of  this  paradox  is  to  be  found  in  a  sequence 
of  causes  and  consequences.  The  British  sol- 
dier is  nourished  on  beef  and  the  quality  of  the 
beef  is  due  to  an  abundance  of  clover,  which 
needs  to  be  fertilized  by  bees.  But  bees  cannot 
multiply  and  live  unless  they  are  protected 
against  the  field-mice  which  destroy  their  broods 
and  ravage  their  reserves  of  honey.  The  field- 
mouse  can  be  kept  down  if  there  are  only  cats 
enough  to  catch  them;  and  cats  are  the  favor- 
ites of  the  frequent  old  maids  of  England.  These 
lonely  virgins  keep  pets  who  prevent  the  mice 
from  despoiling  and  destroying  the  bees,  so 
clover  flourishes  luxuriantly  and  the  cattle  wax 
fat  to  supply  the  soldiers  of  the  king  with  their 
strengthening  rations. 

For  another  illustration  of  a  remote  cause 
having  a  most  unexpected  consequence,  I  am 
able  to  give  chapter  and  verse.  In  Sir  Martin 
Conway's  brilliant  discussion  of  the  '  Domain  of 
Art/  he  tells  us  that  the  beautiful  costumes  of 
the  Cavaliers  of  England,  as  we  see  them  in 
Vandyke's  portraits,  owe  their  chief  embellish- 
ment to  the  hardy  mariners  who  ventured  into 
the  stormy  waters  near  Spitzbergen: 

An  interesting  example  of  the  reaction  of  invention 
or  discovery  upon  one  of  the  arts  of  life  came  recently 

136 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

under  my  observation,  and  is  perhaps  worth  a  brief 
digression  to  record.  In  the  process  of  conducting, 
in  the  Public  Record  Office,  researches  into  the  history 
of  Spitzbergen  and  of  the  English  and  Dutch  whaling 
industries  on  its  coasts,  I  was  struck  by  the  numerous 
documents  relating  to  soap  that  I  kept  encountering. 
On  looking  more  closely  into  the  matter,  it  presently 
appeared  that  the  chief  use  to  which  whale-oil  was  put 
was  the  manufacture  of  the  better  class  of  soap,  such 
as  was  used  in  fine  laundry  work,  commoner  old-fash- 
ioned soap  being  made  out  of  rape-seed.  When  it  is 
borne  in  mind  that,  before  the  beginning  of  the  Eng- 
lish whale-fishery  on  the  Spitzbergen  coasts  about  1610 
there  was  practically  no  whale-oil  brought  into  Eng- 
land, the  relative  dearth  of  good  soap  in  Tudor  days 
may  be  deduced.  Improved  laundry  work  followed 
the  whale-fishery.  Hence  the  relatively  small  ruffs  that 
we  see  in  Tudor  portraits  and  the  small  amount  of 
linen  displayed.  Jacobean  portraits  show  more  linen 
and  lace.  Portraits  of  the  time  of  Charles  I  yet  more. 

As  I  transcribe  this  passage,  due  to  Sir  Mar- 
tin's researches  into  the  history  of  art  and  to 
his  own  exploration  of  Spitzbergen,  I  am  re- 
minded of  a  chat  that  we  had  one  rainy  after- 
noon a  score  of  years  ago  in  the  spacious  smoking- 
room  built  on  the  roof  of  the  Athenaeum  in 
London.  In  the  course  of  our  wandering  con- 
versation we  happened  to  touch  on  this  topic,—- 
the  unknown  origin  of  things  well  known. 

"Are  you  aware,"  he  asked  with  a  smile, 
"that  the  outflowering  of  Tudor  architecture, 
which  is  one  of  the  glories  of  England,  must  be 

137 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

ascribed  to  the  cultivation  of  the  turnip  by  the 
Dutch?" 

I  smiled  in  my  turn  and  admitted  my  igno- 
rance of  this  fact.  "  But  I  can  tell  you,"  I  added, 
"how  it  is  that  Nelson's  victory  at  Trafalgar 
brought  about  the  popularity  of  British  jams 
and  marmalades  in  the  United  States.  Are  you 
aware  of  that?" 

"No,"  he  answered.  "Let  us  expound  our 
riddles  to  each  other." 

I  besought  him  to  begin  the  exposition. 

"Well,"  he  said,  "England  has  a  damp  cli- 
mate, as  you  may  have  noticed;  and  that  makes 
it  the  best  grazing  country  in  the  world — es- 
pecially for  sheep.  But  until  the  culture  of 
root-crops  was  developed  in  Holland  and  trans- 
planted to  England,  our  farmers  found  it  almost 
impossible  to  carry  their  sheep  through  the 
winter.  This  was  made  easy  for  them  by  the 
introduction  of  the  turnip.  Whereupon  there 
was  an  immediate  increase  in  sheep-raising, 
which  ultimately  gave  England  the  immensely 
profitable  wool-trade.  And  the  enriched  Tudor 
merchants,  like  true  Englishmen,  spent  their 
gains  freely  on  their  houses.  Now  for  Trafalgar 
and  marmalade." 

"Well,"  I  said,  "  Nelson's  defeat  of  the  French 
and  Spanish  fleets  gave  England  thereafter  the 
undisputed  command  of  the  sea  and  cut  the 

138 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

Continent  off  from  the  colonies.  The  chief  of 
the  earlier  importations  from  tropical  countries 
had  been  sugar;  and  the  deprivation  of  this  was 
so  keenly  felt  that  Napoleon  offered  a  tempting 
reward  for  a  method  of  making  sugar  inde- 
pendent of  sugar-cane.  This  was  the  origin  of 
the  beet-sugar  industry,  which  had  at  first  to  be 
fostered  by  bounties  from  the  government. 
After  Waterloo,  half  the  countries  of  the  Conti- 
nent found  themselves  with  thousands  of  acres 
of  beet-fields  which  would  go  out  of  cultivation 
if  cane-sugar  should  be  allowed  to  compete.  To 
protect  the  farmers,  some  countries,  including 
Germany,  put  a  high  tariff  on  cane-sugar  and 
paid  an  export-bounty  on  beet-sugar.  As  Eng- 
land was  soon  to  be  a  free-trade  country,  this 
German  bounty-fed  beet-sugar  was  in  time 
dumped  on  the  London  market.  It  ruined  the 
sugar-planters  of  Jamaica  and  Barbadoes;  but 
it  gave  the  British  makers  of  preserves  their 
chief  raw  material  at  a  price  which  enabled  them 
to  import  oranges  from  Spain  to  Dundee  and 
even  strawberries  from  France  to  London,  and 
then  to  export  wholesale  to  the  United  States 
their  marmalades  and  jams." 

"I  see,"  said  Conway,  "and  now  I'd  like  to 
ask  you  whether  you  have  ever  traced  the  de- 
feat of  the  Armada  to  Martin  Luther?  No? 
Then  I  will  enlighten  you  as  to  that.  When 

139 


ON  THE  LENGTH   OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

Henry  VIII  broke  with  the  Pope,  he  followed 
Luther's  example  and  did  away  with  the  fre- 
quent fast-days.  This  was  a  sad  blow  to  the 
fisher  folk;  but  they  regained  a  temporary 
prosperity  under  Mary,  only  to  lose  it  again 
under  Elizabeth.  So  it  was  that  the  experienced 
crews  of  the  fishing  fleet  were  glad  to  volunteer 
to  repel  the  naval  attack  of  the  Spanish  sover- 
eign; and  they  supplied  an  indisputable  element 
to  the  flying  squadrons  of  the  British  ad- 
mirals." 

Then  it  was  my  turn  to  put  another  question. 
"I'd  like  to  ask  whether  you  have  ever  con- 
sidered the  influence  of  the  Gulf  Stream  on  the 
field-sports  of  England,  cricket  and  lawn-tennis 
and  football?  If  these  sports  are  indulged  in 
by  a  multitude  of  young  men  and  maidens,  part 
of  the  credit  must  go  to  the  ample  current  of 
warm  water  which  flows  incessantly  across  the 
Atlantic  in  an  invisible  channel  of  its  own.  As 
the  British  Isles  are  as  far  north  as  is  Labrador 
on  our  side  of  the  Western  Ocean,  they  would  be 
as  desolate  and  as  sparsely  peopled  as  Labrador 
were  it  not  for  the  softening  effect  of  the  Gulf 
Stream.  Because  it  is  nearer  the  Arctic,  Eng- 
land has  a  longer  day  than  France  or  the  United 
States;  and  therefore  the  young  men  and 
maidens  can  do  a  day's  work  and  still  have  two 
or  three  hours  of  daylight  in  which  to  play  out- 
140 


ON  THE   LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

door  games.  So  you  British  had  best  beware, 
for  if  we  Americans  are  ever  aroused  to  wrath 
and  if  we  succeed  in  diverting  the  Gulf  Stream, 
then  Great  Britain  will  speedily  descend  to  the 
sad  condition  of  a  sparsely  inhabited  island." 

Ill 

THE  Gentle  Reader  is  now  in  possession  of  the 
principles  and  the  processes  of  a  novel  sport; 
and  he  can  hunt  down  strange,  unsuspected  and 
remote  causes  whenever  he  is  sleepless  at  night 
or  bookless  on  a  train.  The  game  can  be 
played  by  any  one,  "all  by  his  lone,"  as  a  soli- 
taire; or  a  half-dozen  may  take  part,  sitting  in  a 
cozy  semi-circle  about  the  wood-fire  while  the 
winter  wind  swirls  the  dry  snow  against  the 
frosted  windows.  You  may  seek  out  the  ul- 
terior propulsion  responsible  for  the  arrival  of 
an  event  which  may  be  local  or  national  or  even 
international,  since  no  man's  eye  can  follow  the 
ever-widening  circle  that  any  word  or  deed  may 
set  in  motion. 

Here  are  three  sample  inquiries  likely  to  be 
puzzling  to  novices  at  the  sport.  The  first  is 
very  easy:  Explain  how  it  is  that  the  dykes  of 
Holland  were  responsible  for  the  prevalence  of 
high-stoop  residences  in  Chicago.  The  second 
is  not  quite  so  simple:  Show  how  it  is  that  the 
141 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

invention  of  the  cotton-gin  by  Eli  Whitney  was 
a  dominating  factor  in  the  adoption  by  the 
United  States  of  a  constitutional  amendment 
prohibiting  the  manufacture  and  sale  of  intoxi- 
cating liquors.  And  the  third  takes  a  wider 
range  and  demands  a  ramble  over  three  conti- 
nents: How  was  it  that  Cleveland's  election 
was  one  of  the  reasons  why  the  foreign  lega- 
tions in  Peking  had  to  withstand  the  attacks 
of  the  so-called  Black  Flags  during  the  Boxer 
Rebellion? 

By  the  aid  of  the  dykes  the  Dutch  reclaimed 
a  large  part  of  their  land  from  the  sea,  a  recla- 
mation which  required  a  system  of  canals  to 
catch  the  surface  water.  In  a  flat  country,  hav- 
ing an  intricate  network  of  canals,  it  is  impossible 
to  excavate  dry  cellars  under  the  dwellings.  So 
the  Dutch  raised  the  first  floor  of  their  houses 
that  they  might  construct  cellars  above  the 
water-level;  and  this  forced  them  to  put  a  flight 
of  outside  steps  before  the  front-door.  When 
the  sons  of  Holland  settled  on  Manhattan  Island 
and  founded  New  Amsterdam,  they  cut  a  canal 
into  what  is  now  Broad  Street;  and  in  their 
house-building  they  followed  the  fashions  of 
their  native  land.  From  New  York  the  high 
stoop  was  borrowed  by  many  cities  in  the  West, 
altho  these  towns  had  dry  land  for  their  cellars 
and  altho  the  high  stoop  is  not  an  architectural 
device  of  inherent  attractiveness. 
142 


ON   THE   LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

At  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century  slavery 
was  slowly  disappearing  in  the  United  States. 
It  had  been  abandoned  in  most  of  the  northern 
states;  and  in  the  South  Washington  and  Jef- 
ferson expected  its  early  extinction.  But  Whit- 
ney invented  the  cotton-gin  and  there  followed 
an  immediate  increase  in  the  acreage  in  which 
cotton  was  under  cultivation.  The  southern 
planters  decided  that  they  could  not  do  without 
slave-labor;  and  the  negro  was  emancipated  only 
as  an  incident  of  the  Civil  War.  After  the 
Reconstruction  period  the  black  race  multiplied; 
and  on  the  weaker  members  of  the  race  liquor 
exerted  a  dangerous  influence.  To  remove  the 
temptation  with  its  baleful  possibilities,  the 
white  men  of  the  South,  many  of  whom  were 
not  themselves  abstemious,  voted  for  Prohibi- 
tion. Without  the  support  of  the  solid  South 
the  constitutional  amendment  would  have  failed 
of  ratification. 

In  Cleveland's  second  term  he  sent  to  Congress 
his  Venezuela  message,  which  was  a  notification 
to  all  the  world  that  the  United  States  would 
not  allow  any  European  nation  to  enlarge  the 
boundaries  of  its  possessions  in  South  America, 
— a  notification  fatal  to  the  intention  of  the 
German  Emperor  to  acquire  more  or  less  of 
Brazil.  Forced  to  look  elsewhere,  the  Kaiser 
took  advantage  of  the  killing  of  several  German 
missionaries  to  seize  Kiau-Chau,  a  seizure  which 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

infuriated  the  Chinese  and  which  moved  them 
to  the  Boxer  rebellion  culminating  in  an  attack 
on  the  foreigners  in  Peking. 

IV 

PERHAPS  this  parlor  game  of  unforeseen  con- 
sequences may  appear  to  the  Gentle  Reader  not 
a  little  childish;  and  I  may  as  well  confess  at 
once  that  it  has  been  anticipated  by  one  of  the 
most  primitive  of  nursery-tales,  what  which  ex- 
plains to  us  the  manifold  reasons  why  the  Old 
Woman  could  not  get  home — because  the  Cat 
wouldn't  eat  the  Rat,  because  the  Rat  wouldn't 
gnaw  the  Rope,  because  the  Rope  wouldn't  hang 
the  Butcher,  because  the  Butcher  wouldn't  kill 
the  Calf,  because  the  Calf  wouldn't  drink  the 
Water,  because  the  Water  wouldn't  quench  the 
Fire,  because  the  Fire  wouldn't  burn  the  Stick, 
because  the  Stick  wouldn't  beat  the  Dog,  because 
the  Dog  wouldn't  bite  the  Pig,  and  because  the 
Pig  wouldn't  go  over  the  stile. 

But  it  is  not  so  puerile  a  sport  as  it  may  seem 
if  we  keep  in  mind  always  the  necessary  distinc- 
tion between  the  exciting  cause,  which  may  be 
only  a  triviality  and  the  predisposing  condition, 
which  is  always  the  dominant  factor.  What 
Austin  Dobson  called 

The  little  great,  the  infinite  small  thing, 

That  ruled  the  hour  when  Louis  Quinze  was  king 

144 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

may  be  no  more  than  the  last  ounce  that  weights 
down  the  scales  of  destiny  on  one  side  or  the 
other.  There  is  truth  also  in  the  same  poet's 
assertion  that  the  fan  in  the  delicate  fingers  of 
Madame  de  Pompadour  may  have  given  the 
signal  which  resulted  in  the  ruin  of  a  realm. 

Ah,  but  things  more  than  polite 

Hung  on  this  toy,  voyez  vousl 
Matters  of  state  and  of  might, 

Things  that  great  ministers  do; 

Things  that,  may  be,  overthrew 
Those  in  whose  brains  they  began; 

Here  was  the  sign  and  the  cue, — 
This  was  the  Pompadour's  fan ! 

Yet  it  was  not  the  flutter  of  a  French  fan 
which  brought  about  the  War  of  the  Austrian 
Succession;  it  was  the  selfishness  of  a  German 
king,  as  devoid  of  scruple  as  he  was  free  from 
hypocrisy.  Macaulay  tells  us  that  Frederick's 
own  words  were  that  "ambition,  interest,  the 
desire  of  making  people  talk  about  me  carried 
the  day ;  and  I  decided  for  war. ' '  And  Macaulay 
passed  the  verdict  of  history,  not  to  be  reopened 
even  by  the  eloquent  special  pleading  of  Carlyle: 
"On  the  head  of  Frederick  is  all  the  blood  which 
was  shed  in  a  war  that  raged  during  many  years 
and  in  every  quarter  of  the  globe,  the  blood  of 
the  column  of  Fontenoy,  the  blood  of  the  moun- 
taineers who  were  slaughtered  at  Colloden.  .  .  . 

145 


ON  THE  LENGTH  OF  CLEOPATRA'S  NOSE 

In  order  that  he  might  rob  a  neighbor  whom  he 
had  promised  to  defend,  black  men  fought  on  the 
coast  of  Coromandel,  and  red  men  scalped  each 
other  by  the  Great  Lakes  of  North  America." 

(1921.) 


146 


IX 

CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 


IX 
CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 


IT  is  not  always  that  foreigners,  adrift  for  a 
few  weeks  in  these  United  States,  exhibit  that 
condescension  which  Lowell  resented  sharply. 
Sometimes  they  reveal  themselves  as  very 
frank  in  expressing  their  disappointment  and 
their  disapproval.  It  cannot  be  denied  that 
they  are  often  disappointed  in  us — perhaps  al- 
most as  often  as  we  are  disappointed  in  them. 
They  may  have  ventured  across  the  Western 
Ocean  merely  to  spy  out  the  land,  or  they  may 
have  arrived  as  missionaries  of  culture,  having 
prepared  themselves  to  enlighten  us  by  means 
of  "lectures  in  words  of  one  syllable/' — to  bor- 
row a  pertinent  phrase  of  Colonel  Higginson's. 
But  whether  they  come  as  single  spies  or  in  lec- 
turing battalions  they  rarely  display  the  self- 
control  which  prevented  Thackeray  from  ad- 
verse criticism  of  his  quondam  hosts.  Dickens 
had  been  welcomed  as  the  guest  of  the  nation; 
but  he  did  not  hold  that  the  acceptance  of  our 
hospitality  debarred  him  from  the  privilege  of 
speaking  his  mind  freely  about  his  entertainers. 
149 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

Many  lesser  men  have  shared  our  bread  and 
salt;  and  not  a  few  of  them  have  felt  free  to  fol- 
low the  example  of  Dickens  rather  than  that  of 
Thackeray. 

In  the  fall  of  1909  a  wandering  British  phi- 
losopher, who  hailed  from  the  University  of 
Cambridge,  was  a  guest  at  various  American 
colleges;  and  after  he  had  gone  back  to  his  own 
place  he  published  in  a  Cambridge  review  his 
opinion  that  "in  America  there  is,  broadly 
speaking,  no  culture.  There  is  instruction; 
there  is  research;  there  is  technical  and  profes- 
sional training;  there  is  specialisation  in  science 
and  in  industry;  there  is  every  possible  applica- 
tion of  life  to  purposes  and  ends;  but  there  is  no 
life  for  its  own  sake."  And  he  declared  that 
"you  will  find  if  you  travel  long  in  America,  that 
you  are  suffering  from  a  kind  of  atrophy.  You 
will  not,  at  first,  realise  what  it  means.  But 
suddenly  it  will  flash  upon  you  that  you  are 
suffering  from  lack  of  conversation.  You  do 
not  converse;  you  cannot;  you  can  only  talk. 
It  is  the  rarest  thing  to  meet  a  man  who,  when 
a  subject  is  started,  is  willing  or  able  to  follow 
it  out  into  its  ramifications,  to  play  with  it,  to 
embroider  it  with  pathos  or  with  wit,  to  pene- 
trate to  its  roots,  to  trace  its  connexions  and 
affinities.  Question  and  answer,  anecdote  and 
jest  are  the  staple  of  American  conversation; 

150 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

and,    above    all,    information.    They    have   a 
hunger  for  positive  facts." 

In  a  sweeping  assertion  like  this  there  is  cer- 
tainly no  hint  of  condescension,  even  if  there  is 
in  it  a  disquieting  assumption  of  superiority. 
That  it  should  have  been  made  by  an  English- 
man is  a  little  startling,  since  our  kin  across  the 
sea  would  seem  to  be  related  to  us  in  nothing 
more  intimately  than  in  their  desire  for  informa- 
tion and  their  hunger  for  positive  facts.  It 
would  have  been  more  understandable  if  this 
assertion  had  been  risked  by  a  Frenchman,  since 
the  French  are  governed  by  the  social  instinct 
and  trained  from  their  youth  up  to  be  easy  in 
converse  themselves  and  also  to  put  others  at 
their  ease.  There  it  is,  however,  made  by  an 
Englishman;  and  this  leaves  us  wondering  what 
Hawthorne  could  have  meant  when  he  made 
one  of  the  entries  in  the  notebook  he  kept  while 
he  was  in  exile  as  consul  to  Liverpool.  "I  wish 
I  could  know  exactly  what  the  English  style 
good  conversation.  Probably  it  is  something 
like  plum-pudding, — as  heavy,  but  seldom  as 
rich." 

II 

YET  there  is  profit  always  in  weighing  the 
words  of  an  alien  critic  of  American  character- 
istics and  in  trying  to  discover  how  much  of 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

truth  may  be  contained  in  his  off-hand  opinion. 
We  can  afford  to  overlook  the  casual  discourtesy 
of  his  supercilious  and  superficial  phrase  if  we 
are  able  to  get  at  the  core  of  his  accusation.  It 
is  well  that  we  should  know  ourselves;  and  we 
cannot  deny  our  gratitude  to  the  foreigner  who 
forces  us  to  take  stock  of  our  deficiencies.  If 
we  are  frank  we  must  admit  that  question  and 
answer,  anecdote  and  jest,  are  frequent  in  our 
mouths  and  that  our  ears  hunger  for  informa- 
tion. The  relish  for  anecdote  and  jest  is  one 
manifestation  of  that  omnipresent  American 
humor,  which  is  also  good  humor  and  which 
may  often  degenerate  into  mere  triviality.  The 
desire  for  positive  facts  is  an  attribute  of  our 
practicality,  of  our  ability  to  turn  everything  to 
account.  We  are  not  unlike  the  Athenians  of 
old  in  our  eagerness  to  hear  and  to  tell  some 
new  thing;  and  probably  some  part  of  the  wide- 
spread ability  to  shift  our  ingenuity  suddenly 
into  new  channels  may  be  ascribed  to  this  very 
characteristic.  A  chance  fact  dropped  in  talk 
by  a  stranger,  a  casual  scrap  of  information 
picked  up  by  the  wayside — these  things  may 
have  been  the  seed-corn  of  many  a  new  industry. 
We  have  no  cause  to  blush  when  we  are  told  that 
we  have  a  hunger  for  positive  facts  or  even 
when  we  are  assured  that  the  staple  of  our  talk 
is  question  and  answer. 

152 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

This  is  as  it  should  be;  and  no  man  has  a 
right  to  expect  anything  more  in  ordinary  talk. 
But  the  imported  lecturer  made  a  sharp  dis- 
tinction between  ordinary  talk  and  genuine 
conversation.  Talk  is  all  in  the  day's  work;  it 
is  practical;  it  consists  of  question  and  answer; 
it  lends  itself  lightly  to  the  interchange  of  facts 
and  to  the  swapping  of  stories.  Conversation 
is  another  thing  altogether,  or  rather  it  is  the 
same  thing  elevated  and  glorified.  There  is  the 
same  difference  between  talk  and  conversation 
that  there  is  between  house-painting  and  the 
mural  decoration  of  Puvis  de  Chavannes  or  of 
John  La  Farge.  Talk  might  be  called  one  of 
the  mechanical  arts,  whereas  conversation  is  one 
of  the  fine  arts.  Only  a  man  born  to  the  craft, 
specifically  gifted  for  it,  trained  by  years  of 
practise,  enlightened  by  the  example  of  the  mas- 
ters of  conversation,  can  take  a  subject,  "follow 
it  out  in  all  its  ramifications,  play  with  it,  em- 
broider it  with  pathos  or  with  wit,  penetrate  to 
its  roots,  and  trace  its  connexions  and  affinities." 
A  great  converser  is  like  any  other  great  artist, 
born  not  made, — or  rather  born  and  also  made. 

Our  Cambridge  critic  has  here  supplied  an 
admirable  definition  of  the  fine  art  of  conversa- 
tion as  distinguished  from  the  frankly  inartistic 
talk  of  every  day  life.  Where  he  made  his  slip 
was  in  expecting  to  find  practitioners  of  this 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

delicate  art  scattered  all  over  the  United  States 
wherever  his  engagements  might  take  him.  In 
ho  country  of  the  world  is  any  one  of  the  fine 
arts  cultivated  by  the  average  man;  and  it  is 
absurd  to  expect  the  average  man  to  lift  himself 
to  this  exalted  level  of  artistic  accomplishment. 
The  average  man  has  no  time  for  any  of  the 
fine  arts;  he  is  too  busy  trying  to  keep  a  roof 
over  his  head  and  to  make  a  living  for  his  family. 
The  masters  of  conversation  are  no  more  fre- 
quent in  America  than  they  are  anywhere  else; 
and  the  visitor  from  abroad  is  no  more  likely 
to  drop  into  the  center  of  a  circle  of  these  artists 
here  than  an  American  abroad  is  likely  to  happen 
into  a  similar  group  on  the  other  side.  In  no 
country  do  these  artists  in  conversation  hold 
an  open  exhibition  and  sell  tickets  at  the  door. 
Hawthorne,  for  example,  before  he  went  to 
England,  had  attended  the  Saturday  luncheons 
at  Boston,  with  Lowell  at  one  end  of  the  table 
and  Holmes  at  the  other;  and  it  is  small  wonder 
that  he  failed  to  find  conversation  of  that  kind 
in  Liverpool.  The  itinerant  lecturer  who  re- 
corded his  sufferings  from  a  lack  of  conversa- 
tion here  in  the  United  States  did  not  have  the 
good  fortune  to  penetrate  into  the  circles  where 
that  fine  art  is  cultivated.  At  home  he  knew 
where  to  go  to  get  just  what  he  wanted;  and 
because  he  did  not  know  where  to  get  it  here, 

154 


CONCERNING   CONVERSATION 

he  was  rash  enough  to  deny  that  it  existed. 
The  blunder  may  have  been  natural  enough; 
but  it  was  a  blunder  nevertheless.  And  it  was 
intensified  by  his  failure  to  reflect  on  the  fact 
that  he  was  not  one  of  us,  but  an  outsider,  a 
man  not  tested,  an  unknown  quantity,  passing 
through  hastily  and  only  pausing  here  and  there 
to  eat  and  to  sleep  and  to  speak  his  piece  and 
then  away.  Even  if  he  had  by  chance  found 
himself  in  a  circle  of  true  lovers  of  conversa- 
tion, he  himself  would  have  been  a  disturbing 
element  and  he  might  have  departed  without 
ever  suspecting  that  he  had  been  in  the  company 
of  the  very  artists  whose  society  he  was  vainly 
seeking.  A  master  of  conversation  might  shrink 
from  showing  off  before  a  stranger;  he  might 
prefer  to  reserve  for  his  intimates  the  full  display 
of  his  powers. 

Ill 

OUR  British  visitor  failed  to  find  fit  conver- 
sation here  in  America,  yet  he  seems  to  have 
had  no  doubt  that  it  existed  in  England.  But 
a  recent  American  writer  is  saddened  because  it 
cannot  now  be  found  anywhere.  He  has  as- 
serted that  "present  day  conversation  has  sunk 
far  below  the  high  levels  of  the  talk  of  the  past"; 
that  "our  conversational  performances  are  flat, 
thin  and  poor";  and  "  that  conversation  is  indeed 

155 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

a  lost  art."  He  believed  that  this  assertion 
would  pass  unchallenged  and  he  set  it  in  the 
foreground  of  a  welcome  volume  into  which  he 
collected  half-a-score  of  essays  on  the  subject. 
He  even  ventured  to  entitle  this  agreeable 
gathering  the  'Lost  Art  of  Conversation.'  Here 
again  we  find  cropping  up  the  ineradicable  be- 
lief that  this  is  a  day  of  decadence  and  that 
there  were  giants  in  other  days  to  whose  stature 
we  cannot  hope  to  stretch  ourselves.  We  are 
all  prone  to  be  praisers  of  passed  times, — es- 
pecially when  we  are  very  young  or  very  old. 
The  great  masters  are  all  dead  and  we  have 
been  born  too  late  into  an  exhausted  world. 
There  are  no  great  actors  now  and  no  great 
orators  and  no  great  conversationalists.  Yet 
this  belief  is  the  result  of  an  optical  illusion 
like  that  which  leads  us  to  think  the  telegraph 
poles  are  closer  together  the  farther  off  they  are. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  good  conversation  is 
probably  no  rarer  today  and  in  these  United 
States  than  it  ever  was  anywhere.  It  must 
always  be  rare,  if  conversation  is  truly  one  of 
the  fine  arts.  It  flourished  in  London  in  the 
eighteenth  century  in  the  club,  which  gathered 
about  Johnson,  altho  his  selfish  brutality  must 
often  have  killed  the  easy  interchange  of  ques- 
tion and  answer,  since  Johnson  was  incorrigibly 
domineering;  and  as  Goldsmith  said  "whenever 
his  pistol  missed  fire,  he  knocked  you  down  with 

156 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

the  butt."  Conversation  flourishes  today  in 
New  York  in  several  little  circles  where  there 
are  men  of  the  world  and  men  of  affairs  who 
are  able  to  follow  a  subject  out  into  its  ramifica- 
tions and  to  play  with  it,  penetrating  to  its 
roots  and  embroidering  it  with  wit  and  with 
pathos.  Such  little  circles  are  not  many,  of 
course,  but  they  exist  here  and  now,  known  to 
those  who  are  competent  to  join  them — and 
necessarily  unknown  to  the  rest  of  the  world. 

In  the  illuminating  collection  of  essays  on 
the  'Lost  Art  of  Conversation '  I  find  the  two 
characteristically  acute  papers  of  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson  on  'Talk  and  Talkers/  Stevenson 
was  a  delightful  talker  himself,  as  I  can  testify, 
altho  I  had  only  the  privilege  of  one  afternoon 
session  with  him,  not  long  before  he  left  England 
for  the  last  time.  In  these  essays  he  painted  the 
portraits  of  six  of  his  friends  whom  he  held  to 
be  masters  of  the  art  of  conversation.  These 
friends  whose  powers  he  was  celebrating  he  dis- 
guised under  various  names, — "Burly,"  "Spring 
heel'd  Jack,"  "  Cockshot "  and  "Purcell."  Most 
of  them  are  now  dead  and  there  is  no  indiscre- 
tion in  giving  their  real  names.  "Cockshot" 
was  Professor  Fleeming  Jenkin,  whose  biography 
Stevenson  was  to  write.  "Burly"  was  his 
collaborator,  W.  E.  Henley,  who  turned  traitor 
after  Stevenson's  death.  "Spring  heePd  Jack" 
was  his  cousin,  R.  A.  M.  Stevenson.  "Athel- 

157 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

red"  was,  I  believe,  his  executor,  Mr.  Baxter; 
"Opalstein"  was  John  Addington  Symonds, 
and  "Purcell"  was  Mr.  Edmund  Gosse. 

It  was  my  good  fortune  in  the  early  eighties 
of  the  last  century  to  make  the  acquaintance  of 
four  out  of  the  six;  I  never  had  the  pleasure  of 
talking  with  Symonds  or  with  Mr.  Baxter — and 
I  think  I  had  speech  with  R.  A.  M.  Stevenson 
only  two  or  three  times.  But  the  other  three 
I  met  frequently,  often  together,  altho  they 
were  not  as  intimate  with  each  other  severally 
as  they  were  with  Stevenson  himself.  That 
they  were  masters  of  the  art  of  conversation, 
conscious  and  deliberate  artists, — this  is  be- 
yond all  question.  Fleeming  Jenkin,  more  es- 
pecially, was  one  of  the  most  gifted  and  spon- 
taneous talkers  I  have  ever  had  the  delight  of 
listening  to, — full  of  whim  and  of  wisdom,  de- 
lighting in  expounding  theories  tinctured  with 
his  own  sparkling  originality. 

Yet  I  should  hesitate  to  assign  to  any  one  of 
these  four  British  subjects  a  higher  place  in  the 
hierarchy  of  good  talkers  than  I  should  bestow 
upon  four  American  citizens, — Thomas  B.  Reed 
and  John  Hay,  Clarence  King  and  Thomas 
Bailey  Aldrich.  They  were  all  wits,  but  they 
none  of  them  insisted  on  reducing  talk  to  a 
soliloquy,  as  Macaulay  and  Gladstone  were 
wont  to  do.  A  brilliant  conversationalist  can- 

158 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

not  be  a  monolog  artist.  He  must  give  and 
take;  he  must  play  the  game  fairly,  allowing  his 
associates  a  chance  to  show  what  they  can  do 
also.  On  the  other  hand,  wit  is  the  most 
precious  ingredient  of  good  talk;  and  no  lover 
of  high  converse  will  hold  with  Prior's  man  who 

Thinks  wit  the  bane  of  conversation, 
And  says  that  learning  spoils  a  nation. 

Tom  Reed's  conversation  was  a  constant  de- 
light, due  in  part  to  his  caustic  wit.  John  Hay 
had  the  same  wide  knowledge  of  men  and  affairs; 
and  his  talk  was  also  flavored  with  a  subacid 
wit.  Clarence  King  had  an  equally  large  ac- 
quaintance with  the  world  and  an  equally  frank 
delivery  of  his  opinion  about  men  and  things. 
And  as  for  Aldrich,  pearls  of  wit  dropped  from 
his  lips  whenever  he  opened  his  mouth.  I 
chanced  to  say  to  him  once  that  it  was  curious 
how  a  certain  British  scholar,  who  seemed  to 
have  read  everything  and  written  about  every- 
thing, should  not  have  gained  greater  wisdom 
by  all  his  labors.  "Yes,"  said  Aldrich,  "he  is 
like  a  gaspipe, — no  richer  for  the  illumination  it 
has  conveyed." 

IV 

OF  course,  this  specimen  brick  is  wholly  in- 
adequate even  to  suggest  an  idea  of  the  house 
of  conversation  in  which  Reed  and  Hay,  Aldrich 

159 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

and  King,  made  themselves  at  home.  Good 
talk  is  not  merely  a  swift  succession  of  good 
things;  and  after  a  while  a  sequence  of  smart 
sayings  will  prove  fatiguing.  The  subject  must 
be  embroidered  with  pathos  as  well  as  with  wit, 
and  it  must  be  penetrated  to  its  roots  and  ex- 
plored in  its  affinities,  as  the  British  lecturer 
asserted.  Good  talk  calls  for  the  clash  of  opin- 
ions and  for  the  shock  of  prejudices.  Contra- 
diction— the  courteous  contradiction  of  an  equal 
who  has  self-respect  so  abundant  that  he  re- 
spects also  the  views  of  his  opponent, — contra- 
diction is  of  the  essence  of  the  contract.  There 
never  was  a  more  foolish  definition  than  that 
which  declared  an  agreeable  man  to  be  "a  man 
who  agrees  with  you."  So  far  as  conversation 
is  concerned  an  agreeable  man  is  one  who  dis- 
agrees with  you,  courteously  but  insistently, — • 
who  assaults  your  private  opinions  and  who 
takes  your  pet  prejudices  by  storm.  For  really 
good  talk  you  need  the  man  who  can  see  both 
sides  of  a  question  and  who  can  suddenly  dis- 
cover a  third  side,  disconcerting  to  both  parties. 
He  may  be  a  feeble  arithmetician  who  tries  to 
make  two  half-truths  equal  a  whole  truth;  and 
yet  even  this  may  be  risked  in  conversation, 
sprung  upon  the  hearers  unexpectedly,  to  force 
them  to  go  back  to  first  principles. 
It  seemed  fairest  to  match  Stevenson's  quartet 
160 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

of  British  conversers  with  four  Americans  now 
departed  and  therefore  to  be  named  here  with- 
out impropriety.  In  my  own  generation  I 
should  be  at  no  loss  to  single  out  at  least  half-a- 
dozen  masters  of  the  art  of  conversation,  not 
unworthy  of  comparison  with  those  whom  I  have 
already  called  to  the  witness  stand.  Two  or 
three  of  my  colleagues  at  Columbia  University 
could  not  be  omitted  from  any  catalog  of  com- 
petent conversers;  they  are  scholars  who  have 
not  allowed  their  wide  knowledge  to  weigh  down 
their  wit  and  who  are  free  from  the  reproach 
that  Vauvenargues  brought  against  "the  men 
of  learning  who  resemble  gross  feeders  with  a 
bad  digestion."  Equally  insistent  upon  admis- 
sion to  the  list  of  the  good  talkers  I  happen  to 
know  are  two  artists,  one  a  mural  painter  and 
the  other  an  illustrator,  whose  conversation  has 
the  ring  of  the  true  metal.  Both  of  them  have 
what  Stevenson  credited  to  Henley,  "a  desire  to 
hear, — altho  not  always  to  listen."  Altho  both 
of  them  may  succumb  on  occasion  to  the  temp- 
tation to  monolog,  they  can  be  tempted  into 
team-play,  serving  an  idea  like  a  tennis-ball, 
with  long  rallies,  during  which  the  subject  flies 
high  and  is  returned  sharply  and  seems  about 
to  fall  to  the  ground  only  to  be  caught  up  dexter- 
ously and  driven  into  an  unexpected  corner. 
The  reason  why  conversation  of  the  highest 
161 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

type  is  infrequent  is  that  its  substance  must  be 
ideas  rather  than  things  or  persons.  Now,  the 
immense  majority  of  mankind  seem  to  be  in- 
terested if  not  solely,  at  least  chiefly,  in  persons. 
Nothing  human  is  foreign  to  them  and  they  take 
a  keen  relish  in  discussing  their  fellow  creatures. 
Yet  the  bulk  of  this  talk  is  about  individuals, 
known  to  the  talkers  themselves;  and  the  con- 
versation of  the  majority  rarely  aspires  to  deal 
with  humanity  at  large,  with  men  and  women 
in  their  ampler  relations.  For  the  most  part  this 
talk  is  mere  gossip,  the  interchange  of  question 
and  answer  about  friends  and  acquaintances. 
A  comfortable  minority  may  like  to  converse 
about  things,  and  to  exchange  information.  It 
is  this  minority  which  exhibits  that  hunger  for 
facts,  which  our  British  visitor  noted.  Com- 
paratively few  are  those  who  can  lift  themselves 
up  to  the  level  of  general  ideas  and  who  can 
tunnel  down  to  the  principles  which  govern 
human  conduct.  Yet  conversation  displays  it- 
self to  best  advantage  only  when  the  participants 
are  willing  to  deal  with  ideas,  rather  than  with 
persons  and  things, — altho  without  neglecting 
these.  Not  only  must  they  be  willing  to  do 
this,  they  must  also  be  capable  of  it.  They  need 
a  broad  basis  of  knowledge  as  well  as  a  shrewd 
understanding  of  human  nature  and  of  the  in- 
terplay of  the  social  forces. 
162 


CONCERNING  CONVERSATION 

When  the  requirements  and  conditions  of 
genuine  conversation  are  clearly  apprehended, 
we  need  not  be  surprised  that  it  is  a  rarity 
today  and  that  it  always  has  been  a  rarity. 
And  we  can  appreciate  the  full  meaning  of 
Holmes's  assertion  in  the '  Autocrat  of  the  Break- 
fast Table'— that  "talking  is  one  of  the  fine 
arts, — the  noblest,  the  most  important,  the 
most  difficult, — and  its  fluent  harmonies  may 
be  spoiled  by  the  intrusion  of  a  single  harsh 
note." 

(1910.) 


163 


X 

THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 


X 

THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 


DOCTOR  HOLMES  once  declared  that  the 
bound  volumes  of  comic  papers  were 
"cemeteries  of  hilarity,  interspersed  with  ceno- 
taphs of  wit  and  humor."  Probably  he  would 
have  admitted  that  only  the  cypress  and  the 
yew  could  supply  appropriate  shelving  for  the 
second-rate  comic  plays  of  the  immediate  past, 
brisk  enough  in  the  performance  not  so  very 
long  ago,  and  yet  sadly  old-fashioned  now  that 
our  taste  in  jokes  has  changed.  Still,  a  wise 
word  or  a  witty  may  be  gleaned  even  from  these 
forlorn  pieces,  which  we  may  dismiss  with  what 
the  colored  gentleman  aptly  called  "despisery." 
In  a  forgotten  English  comedy  of  the  second 
half  of  the  nineteenth  century,  a  man,  describ- 
ing the  only  kind  of  woman  he  would  be  willing 
to  marry,  asserted  that  she  must  be  a  clever 
woman,  a  very  clever  woman — "a  woman  clever 
enough  to  begin  a  conversation  with  a  repartee ! " 
This  is  evidence  that  bachelors  are  ever  un- 
reasonable in  the  demands  they  make  upon 
167 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

spinsters,  since  there  never  was  a  woman  clever 
enough  to  open  a  conversation  with  a  retort. 
Any  dictionary  will  remind  us  that  a  mere 
smart  saying,  a  glittering  epigram,  a  brilliant 
witticism,  is  not  entitled  to  be  received  as  a 
repartee  unless  it  is  a  rejoinder.  The  exact 
definition  of  repartee  is  "a  clever,  ready,  and 
witty  retort." 

In  one  of  the  Leatherstocking  tales,  Cooper 
narrates  that  Natty  Bumppo  was  engaged  in 
single  combat  with  an  adroit  Indian  foe,  and 
that  the  redskin  finally  cast  his  tomahawk  at 
the  white  hunter.  Leatherstocking  swiftly 
stepped  aside,  and  with  inconceivable  dexterity 
caught  the  glittering  weapon  as  it  flew  through 
the  air,  and  with  unerring  aim  hurled  it  back, 
to  sink  into  the  brain  of  his  supple  enemy. 
That  was  a  true  repartee — the  rejoinder  of  the 
backwoods,  the  retort  in  kind,  which  closes  a 
conversation  and  renders  all  further  discussion 
unnecessary.  It  is  therefore  quite  different  from 
Leatherstocking's  marvelous  feats  of  marksman- 
ship, when  he  drew  a  bead  on  a  distant  foe  and 
dropped  him  in  his  tracks  before  the  enemy 
knew  what  had  hit  him. 

If  we  accept  this  distinction,  as  I  think  we 
must,  we  are  forced  to  rule  out  a  host  of  unex- 
pected witticisms,  spontaneously  generated,  and 
yet  devoid  of  this  element  of  rejoinder.  They 
1 68 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

may  be  as  rapid  and  as  recreative  as  the  true 
repartee,  but  they  lack  this  necessary  element 
of  self-defense,  of  legitimate  reprisal.  Congreve 
once  told  Colley  Gibber  that  there  were  many 
witty  speeches  in  one  of  Gibber's  comedies,  and 
also  many  speeches  that  looked  witty  and  yet 
were  not  really  what  they  seemed  at  first  sight. 
So  there  are  delightfully  sudden  flashes  of  wit 
which  look  like  repartees,  and  yet  are  not  when 
they  are  examined  more  closely.  They  are 
none  the  less  delightful,  but  they  are  to  be  classi- 
fied under  another  head.  Here  is  an  example 
of  the  instantaneous  quip  which  is  not  a  true 
repartee,  felicitous  as  it  is.  Some  years  ago  a 
friend  of  Mr.  Oliver  Herford's  was  going  to 
Europe  on  the  "  Celtic,"  and  the  evening  before 
his  departure  Mr.  Herford  called  him  up  on  the 
telephone  to  say  good-by.  He  asked  what  ship 
his  friend  was  going  on,  and  some  imp  of  the 
perverse  prompted  the  friend  to  answer  that  he 
was  sailing  on  the  "Keltic."  Mr.  Herford 
promptly  responded,  "  Don't  say  that,  or  you 
will  have  a  hard  C  all  the  way  across ! " 

We  come  a  little  closer  to  the  genuine  re- 
joinder, and  again  without  attaining  it,  in  a 
sharp  turn  attributed  to  Voltaire.  That  arch- 
wit  was  once  speaking  in  praise  of  a  certain 
contemporary  man  of  letters,  and  a  bystander 
remarked  that  it  was  very  good  of  M.  de  Vol- 
169 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

taire  to  say  pleasant  things  of  this  man,  since 
he  was  always  saying  unpleasant  things  of  Vol- 
taire; whereupon  Voltaire  smiled  sweetly  and 
suggested,  "Perhaps  we  are  both  of  us  mis- 
taken." This  may  be  accepted  as  a  retort  to 
an  absent  adversary.  It  has  the  obvious  ele- 
ment of  self-defense,  which  is  ever  the  essential 
quality  of  the  true  repartee,  and  it  recalls  the 
wise  saying  that  it  is  the  man  who  returns  the 
first  blow  that  begins  the  quarrel. 

Voltaire's  rejoinder  is  characteristically  neat. 
It  has  the  dexterity  of  the  Oriental  executioner, 
who  seemed  only  to  be  flourishing  his  sword 
until  he  presented  his  snuff-box,  whereupon  the 
victim  promptly  sneezed  his  amputated  head 
from  his  unsuspecting  shoulders.  It  is  in  marked 
contrast  to  the  surly  brutality  of  Doctor  John- 
son's verbal  boxing.  After  all,  the  proper 
weapon  for  the  accomplished  master  of  fence  is 
the  delicate  duelling-sword  and  not  the  bludgeon 
or  the  boomerang,  even  if  these  more  vulgar  in- 
struments may  also  be  wielded  with  deadly  effect. 
At  bottom,  what  gives  to  the  true  repartee  its 
utmost  effect  is  the  fact  that  the  enginer  has 
been  hoist  by  his  own  petard;  he  is  summarily 
disposed  of  while  the  rest  of  us  are  dazzled  by 
the  unforeseen  sparks  of  the  explosion. 

Speaker  Reed  was  once  discussing  the  merits 
of  President  Harrison  with  a  fellow-congress- 
170 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

man,  who,  remembering  that  Reed's  well-known 
dislike  of  the  President  was  heightened  by  the 
fact  that  in  the  appointment  of  a  collector  of  the 
port  of  Portland  Reed's  candidate  had  been 
turned  down  in  favor  of  the  Maine  senator's, 
said: 

"Of  course,  Mr.  Reed,  I  know  that  Mr.  Har- 
rison can't  say  'No'  gracefully." 

At  which  Reed  flashed  out:  "Oh,  it's  worse 
than  that.  He  can't  say  'Yes'  gracefully." 

The  mention  of  Reed  leads  naturally  to  the 
mention  of  Bismarck,  also  a  master  of  debate 
in  his  own  lordly  fashion.  In  the  days  when 
the  Seven  Weeks'  War  with  Austria  was  already 
looming  in  the  distance,  a  French  minister  at 
one  of  the  German  courts  protested  against 
Prussia's  conduct  and  warned  Bismarck  that, 
if  it  continued,  it  would  lead  Prussia  straight  to 
Jena.  Bismarck  looked  the  Frenchman  in  the 
eye  and  asked  the  simple  question,  "Why  not 
to  Waterloo?" 

In  like  manner  the  mention  of  Waterloo  leads 
naturally  to  the  mention  of  Napoleon  and  Tal- 
leyrand, who  were  necessary  to  each  other,  but 
who  crossed  swords  often,  none  the  less.  When 
Talleyrand  was  created  Prince  of  Ben  event,  he 
presented  his  wife  to  the  emperor.  Napoleon 
knew  that  the  new  princess  resembled  the  hero- 
ine of  the  modern  problem-play  in  that  she  was 
171 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

A  lady  with  a  record 
Whose  career  was  rather  checkered, 

so  he  expressed  his  hope  that  her  conduct  in  the 
future  would  be  in  accord  with  her  exalted  rank. 
And  Talleyrand  bowed,  and  responded  that 
Mme.  de  Talleyrand  would  undoubtedly  pat- 
tern her  conduct  on  that  of  the  empress.  He 
knew,  and  he  knew  that  Napoleon  knew  that 
he  knew,  how  much  scandal  had  attached  to 
the  conduct  of  Josephine  even  after  she  had 
married  Napoleon. 

In  one  of  the  bitter  scenes  of  altercation 
which  were  not  infrequent  between  Napoleon 
and  his  indispensable  minister,  the  emperor  de- 
clared that  Talleyrand  probably  expected  to  be 
chief  of  the  regency  if  Napoleon  died.  "But 
remember  this/'  threatened  the  irate  sovereign, 
"if  I  fall  dangerously  ill,  you  will  be  dead  be- 
fore me."  And  Talleyrand  bowed  ceremoni- 
ously and  answered,  "Sire,  I  did  not  need  this 
warning  to  address  to  heaven  my  most  ardent 
wishes  for  the  conservation  of  Your  Majesty's 
health." 

On  another  occasion  Talleyrand  heard  a  cer- 
tain general  talking  contemptuously  of  a  class 
of  persons  whom  he  designated  as  pekins. 
Talleyrand  asked  who  were  the  creatures  so 
curtly  dismissed  as  unworthy  of  regard.  The 
general  gladly  explained  that,  "We  soldiers  call 
172 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

everybody  a  pekin  who  is  not  military."  And 
Talleyrand  accepted  the  explanation  with  his 
usual  suavity.  "I  see,"  he  said,  "it  is  just  like 
what  we  do  when  we  call  anybody  military 
who  is  not  civil." 

Many  of  the  best  of  Talleyrand's  good  things 
are  to  be  classed  as  true  repartee;  but  on  occa- 
sion he  was  tempted  by  his  readiness  of  wit  to 
puncture  pretenders  even  when  he  himself  had 
not  been  attacked.  When  a  silly  young  fellow, 
seated  between  Mme.  de  Stael  and  Mme. 
Recamier,  had  the  folly  to  insult  both  ladies  by 
the  remark  that  he  was  now  between  wit  and 
beauty,  Talleyrand  could  not  resist  the  tempta- 
tion. "Yes,"  he  remarked,  "and  without  pos- 
sessing either."  At  first  glance  this  may  look 
like  an  unprovoked  assault;  and  yet  it  may  really 
be  defended  as  a  repartee,  since  it  was  due 
to  the  desire  to  avenge  a  thoughtless  slur  on 
two  ladies  to  whom  he  was  greatly  attracted. 
Indeed,  Mme.  de  Stael,  when  she  was  most  in- 
timate with  Talleyrand,  was  not  a  little  jealous 
of  Mme.  Recamier.  Once  she  inquired  of  Tal- 
leyrand which  of  them  he  would  fish  out  of  the 
water  if  she  and  Mme.  Recamier  happened  to 
fall  in  at  the  same  time.  And  again  Talleyrand 
was  equal  to  the  occasion.  With  his  most  flat- 
tering smile  he  replied,  "Ah,  Madame,  you 
swim  so  well." 

173 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 


II 

THERE  is  a  charming  subtlety  about  this 
which  seems  characteristically  French.  Yet  we 
can  now  and  again  attain  to  an  easy  felicity  that 
a  Frenchman  might  envy.  When  the  late 
Maurice  Barrymore  was  once  holding  forth  with 
his  exuberant  humor,  an  intoxicated  bystander 
rudely  interrupted  by  crying  out,  "You're  a 
liar!"  Barrymore  was  known  to  be  a  handy 
man  with  his  fists,  and  the  spectators  expected 
a  swift  blow  from  the  shoulder.  It  came  only 
from  the  lips.  Barrymore  saw  the  man's  con- 
dition, and  with  a  light  laugh  responded,  "  Surely 
not — if  you  say  so ! " 

This  may  be  accepted  as  the  repartee  in  all 
its  nakedness.  In  fact,  the  repartee  is  almost 
always  an  ingenious  variation  of  the  everlasting 
retort,  "You're  another!"  It  is  contained  in 
its  simplest  form  in  the  ancient  and  honorable 
dialogue  which  begins,  "You're  no  gentleman !" 
and  which  ends,  "You're  no  judge!"  There  is 
a  variant  of  this  which  describes  the  fisticuffs  of 
two  rude  fellows  of  the  baser  sort,  one  of  whom 
is  heard  to  declare,  "I'll  learn  you  to  behave 
like  a  gentleman!"  whereat  the  other  insists, 
"I  defy  you  to  do  it."  And  we  may  discover 
an  analogy  between  these  two  masculine  rep- 

174 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

artees  and  a  feminine  repartee  credited  to  a 
British  suffragette.  A  puny  male  offensively 
thrust  himself  forward  and  interrupted  the  lady's 
eloquent  address  with  the  irrelevant  query, 
" Wouldn't  you  jolly  well  like  to  be  a  man?" 
And  the  champion  of  the  fair  sex  instantly 
proved  its  superiority  by  the  counter-question, 
"Wouldn't  you?" 

By  the  side  of  this  intersexual  retort  may  be 
placed  several  international  repartees,  all  cred- 
ited to  that  anonymous  but  fascinating  entity, 
the  American  Girl.  Once  when  a  Beef-eater  at 
the  Tower  of  London  was  displaying  its  trea- 
sures to  a  party  of  transatlantic  pilgrims,  he  drew 
special  attention  to  a  certain  gun,  "captured  at 
the  battle  of  Bunker  Hill,  ladies  and  gentlemen ! " 
And  then  the  American  Girl  rose  to  the  occasion. 
"I  see,"  she  said  meekly,  "you  have  the  cannon, 
and  we  have  the  hill."  This  is  perhaps  a  little 
sharper  and  less  obvious  than  another  of  her 
retorts,  called  forth  by  the  remark  of  an  Eng- 
lish lady  to  the  effect  that  she  could  see  "no 
reason  why  you  Americans  seem  to  think  so 
much  of  your  own  country."  Then  the  Ameri- 
can Girl  replied  languidly,  "I  suppose  it  must 
be  because  we  have  seen  some  of  the  other 
countries."  Closely  akin  to  this  is  her  swift  re- 
sponse to  another  British  dame  who  had  read 
in  the  London  papers  horrible  details  about 

175 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

evil  doings  in  the  United  States  and  who  was 
thereby  moved  to  suggest  that  if  things  did  not 
improve,  it  might  be  necessary  to  send  over  an 
army  to  chastise  us.  Whereupon  the  American 
Girl  affected  surprise  and  asked,  "What — 
again  ?  " 

When  Oscar  Wilde  came  to  the  United  States 
to  lecture  on  esthetics  in  his  highly  esthetic 
velvet  costume, — and  incidentally  to  prepare  the 
public  mind  for  the  proper  appreciation  of 
Gilbert  and  Sullivan's  '  Patience/  in  which  the 
esthetic  movement  was  held  up  to  ridicule, — 
he  used  to  complain  that  America  was  very  un- 
interesting since  it  had  "no  antiquities  and  no 
curiosities."  But  he  ventured  on  this  dispar- 
agement once  too  often,  for  in  the  course  of  his 
travels  he  uttered  it  to  the  American  Girl,  and 
she  replied  with  the  demure  depravity  of  candid 
innocence  that  this  was  not  quite  a  fair  reproach, 
since  "we  shall  have  the  antiquities  in  time, 
and  we  are  already  importing  the  curiosities." 

Lamb  once  declared  that  it  was  some  compen- 
sation for  growing  old  that  in  his  youth  he  had 
seen  the  'School  for  Scandal7  acted  by  the  in- 
comparable cast  that  illuminated  the  original 
performance;  and  perhaps  the  present  writer 
may  discover  a  like  compensation  in  the  fact 
that  he  can  recall  the  elder  Sothern's  rich  and 
mellow  rendering  of  the  'Crushed  Tragedian.' 
176 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

Hazlitt — writing,  it  is  true,  before  the  full 
flowering  of  the  modern  novel — asserted  that 
"to  read  a  good  comedy  is  to  keep  the  best  com- 
pany in  the  world,  where  the  best  things  are 
said  and  the  most  amusing  happen."  Yet  even 
better  than  the  reading  of  a  good  comedy,  en- 
tertaining as  that  may  be,  is  the  recalling  of  its 
performance,  with  the  echo  of  its  best  things  in 
our  ears  and  with  the  memory  of  its  amusing 
happenings  rising  unbidden  before  our  eyes. 
The  'Crushed  Tragedian'  was  not  a  very  good 
comedy,  taken  as  a  whole;  but  Sothern's  per- 
formance of  the  broken-down  old  actor  was  a 
delight  that  no  one  who  ever  enjoyed  it  would 
willingly  forget.  Rising  on  the  top  wave  of 
joyous  recollection  is  the  superb  attitude  of  tri- 
umph assumed  by  Sothern  as  the  old  actor 
transfixes  one  of  the  other  characters  with  what 
he  believes  to  be  a  master  stroke  of  repartee. 
The  other  character  is  an  old  banker,  who,  when 
he  learns  that  Sothern  is  an  actor,  makes  the 
lordly  remark  that  "it  is  twenty  years  since  I 
have  been  in  a  theater."  This  gives  the  crushed 
tragedian  his  chance,  and  with  immense  scorn 
he  hurls  back  the  withering  words,  "It  is  about 
the  same  time  since  7  have  been  in  a  bank!" 

This  is  transcendental  in  its  sublimity.     It  is 
very  much  more  felicitous  than  the  more  ob- 
vious rejoinder  in  one  of  Augier's  comedies,  in 
177 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

the  course  of  which  two  friends  discover  that 
they  have  made  a  mistake.  "What  fools  we 
have  been !"  one  of  them  admits;  and  the  other, 
a  little  nettled,  replies,  "Put  that  in  the  singu- 
lar." "Certainly,"  the  first  retorts;  "what  a 
fool  you  have  been ! "  Obvious  as  this  is,  and 
inexpensive  as  it  must  be  considered,  it  falls  com- 
pletely within  the  definition  of  the  repartee. 
Not  a  few  other  examples  might  be  picked  from 
the  pages  of  the  younger  Dumas  and  Beau- 
marchais,  as  well  as  from  those  of  Sheridan  and 
Congreve.  Perhaps  it  is  because  actors  are  in 
the  habit  of  taking  part  in  the  amusing  happen- 
ings of  good  comedies,  and  of  uttering  the  good 
things  prepared  for  them  by  the  authors,  that 
they  are  encouraged  to  achieve  good  things  of 
their  own.  During  the  run  of  the  'Blue  Bird' 
in  New  York  last  winter,  a  friend  of  the  late 
Jacob  Wendell  (who  played  the  part  of  the 
faithful  Dog  in  Maeterlinck's  fairy  allegory) 
met  him  at  The  Players.  This  friend  praised 
Wendell's  performance  of  the  canine  character, 
with  the  sole  reservation  of  the  barking.  That, 
the  volunteer  critic  insisted,  was  not  so  true  to 
life  as  it  should  be;  he  declared  finally,  "I  could 
just  naturally  bark  better  than  that  myself." 
And  Wendell  gravely  expostulated,  "Ah,  but, 
you  see,  I  had  to  learn  my  bark." 


,  THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

V       - 
III 

THIS  may  be  taken  as  an  example  of  the  re- 
tort courteous,  altho  it  is  not  as  gentle  as  one  of 
Thackeray's.  When  the  novelist  made  his 
single  attempt  to  be  elected  to  Parliament,  he 
happened  one  day  to  meet  the  rival  candidate, 
who  parted  from  him  with  the  familiar  Anglo- 
Saxon  phrase,  "May  the  best  man  win!"  To 
this  Thackeray  instantly  responded,  "I  hope 
not!"  Thackeray's  collaborator  in  the  pages 
of  Punch,  Douglas  Jerrold,  was  incapable  of 
a  suave  rejoinder  of  this  sort.  Jerrold  was  in 
fact  a  little  like  Doctor  Johnson,  in  his  disregard 
for  the  feelings  of  others  and  in  his  willingness 
to  give  pain  for  the  pleasure  of  his  own  wit. 
When  Bentley  the  publisher  told  Jerrold  that 
he  had  at  first  intended  to  call  his  new  maga- 
zine the  Wit's  Miscellany  but  had  finally  de- 
cided to  style  it  Bentley's  Miscellany,  Jerrold 
smiled  bitterly  and  said,  "Well,  you  needn't 
have  gone  to  the  other  extreme."  This  is  not  a 
true  repartee,  since  it  was  wholly  gratuitous, 
being  entirely  without  provocation. 

The  sole  justification  for  the  bold  retort  is 

that  it  is  a  weapon  of  self-defense.    Tennyson, 

so  we  were  told,  used  to  delight  in  narrating  a 

rejoinder  of  a  certain  more  or  less  disreputable 

179 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

man  about  town,  named  Trumpington,  who  was 
a  crony  of  George  IV.  Once  when  the  king 
came  down  to  a  seaside  resort,  he  met  his  friend 
with  the  remark,  "I  hear  you  are  the  biggest 
blackguard  in  the  place."  And  Trumpington 
bowed  and  responded,  "I  hope  Your  Majesty 
has  not  come  down  here  to  take  away  my  char- 
acter." By  the  side  of  this  may  be  put  a  remark 
of  Ben  Butler's  during  the  Credit  Mobilier  de- 
bate of  1873,  perhaps  not  strictly  a  repartee 
by  the  definition  insisted  upon  in  these  pages, 
and  yet  so  near  to  the  margin  of  the  definition 
that  it  deserves  mention  here.  Butler  had 
objected  to  an  elaborate  and  unduly  distended 
speech  of  an  opponent,  who  expostulated  with 
the  plea  that  he  had  expected  to  divide  time 
with  the  honorable  gentleman  opposite.  To 
this  Butler  retorted:  "Divide  time?  It  looks 
to  me  more  like  dividing  eternity." 

There  is  an  epigram  often  attributed  to  Sheri- 
dan, but  really  composed  by  Lewis,  the  author 
of  the  'Monk,'  which  preserves  in  rime  a  rep- 
artee that  may  have  been  due  originally  to 
Sheridan  himself: 

Lord  Erskine,  at  woman  presuming  to  rail, 
Called  a  wife,  "a  tin  canister  tied  to  one's  tail." 
And  fair  Lady  Anne,  while  the  subject  he  carries  on, 
Seems  hurt  by  his  lordship's  degrading  comparison. 
But  wherefore  degrading  ?    Considered  aright, 

180 


THE  GENTLE  ART  OF  REPARTEE 

A  canister's  useful  and  polished  and  bright; 
And  should  dirt  its  original  purity  hide — 
That's  the  fault  of  the  puppy  to  whom  it  is  tied. 

On  one  occasion,  at  least,  Sheridan  and  Lewis 
sparred,  and  the  author  of  the  '  School  for  Scan- 
dal '  countered  neatly  on  the  author  of  the '  Castle 
Specter/  This  last  piece  was  a  tawdry  melo- 
drama which  had  proved  very  attractive  at 
Drury  Lane,  although  it  had  not  brought  to 
Lewis  what  he  believed  to  be  a  proportionate 
share  of  its  profits.  By  chance  the  manager 
and  the  author  had  a  dispute  about  some  ques- 
tion of  the  hour,  and  Lewis  offered  to  back  his 
opinion  with  a  bet.  "I'll  make  a  big  bet,"  he 
cried;  "I'll  bet  you  what  you  have  made  by 
my  play."  "No,"  retorted  Sheridan,  "I'll 
make  only  a  little  bet.  I'll  bet  you  what  your 
play  is  really  worth." 

It  is  an  interesting  fact  that  Sheridan,  prodigal 
as  he  was  of  wit,  in  life  as  in  literature,  was 
sparing  of  repartee,  or  at  least  that  his  repartee 
was  rarely  or  never  offensive.  His  humor  was 
good  humor  also,  and  that  can  rarely  be  said  of 
a  wit.  Moore,  in  his  memorial  poem,  declared 
that  Sheridan's  wit 

Ne'er  carried  a  heart-stain  away  on  its  blade. 

Sheridan  was  liked  by  those  he  laughed  at. 
He  was  that  rare  character,  a  wit,  ready  at 
181 


THE   GENTLE   ART  ^F  REPARTEE 

repartee,  and  yet  not  feared.  He  was  popular, 
notwithstanding  Chesterfield's  wise  remark  that 
to  be  known  as  a  wit  "is  a  very  unpopular  de- 
nomination, as  it  carries  terror  along  with  it; 
and  people  in  general  are  as  much  afraid  of  a 
live  wit,  in  company,  as  a  woman  is  of  a  gun, 
which  she  thinks  may  go  off  of  itself  and  do  her 
a  mischief."  If  wit  is  a  gun,  repartee  is  some- 
times a  gun  that  kicks  and  sorely  bruises  the 
shoulder  of  him  who  fires  it.  A  weapon  of  self- 
defense  it  may  be,  but,  like  other  weapons,  it 
sometimes  proves  a  dangerous  possession.  Per- 
haps a  time  may  come  when  men  will  not  be 
allowed  to  carry  wit  concealed  about  their  per- 
sons without  a  special  permit  from  the  municipal 
authorities,  to  be  granted  only  to  those  who  can 
bring  testimonials  to  the  gentleness  of  their 
character. 

(1912.) 


182 


XI 

COSMOPOLITAN   COOKERY 


XI 

COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 


*^JOT  long  ago  I  chanced  to  see  in  a  New  York 
-L^i  newspaper  a  doleful  letter  from  a  British 
subject  temporarily  marooned  on  Manhattan 
Island  in  which  he  deplored  and  denounced 
American  cookery.  He  went  so  far  as  to  deny 
us  any  skill  whatever  in  the  art  without  which 
men  may  not  live.  As  I  read  this  perf ervid  epis- 
tle, due,  it  may  be,  to  the  indigestion  provoked 
by  the  fried  beefsteak  in  a  one-night-town  hotel, 
I  smiled  at  the  memory  of  other  and  equally 
unrestrained  outcries  which  I  had  heard  from 
Americans  in  Paris,  protesting  that  they  couldn't 
get  anything  fit  to  eat  in  the  City  of  Light. 
These  wandering  fellow-countrymen  of  mine  felt 
themselves  defrauded  at  being  unable  to  order 
corn-bread  and  beaten  biscuit,  codfish-balls  and 
buckwheat-cakes,  when  they  sat  themselves 
down  in  the  breakfast-room  of  their  Parisian 
hotel. 

Recalling  these  Yankee  ululations  I  under- 
stood the  cockney  wails,  and  I  wondered  what 
British  dainty  it  was  that  the  straying  Londoner 

185 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

had  failed  to  find  in  New  York.  Was  it  veal-and- 
ham  pie,  that  substantial  solid,  or  jugged  hare, 
that  unspeakable  delicacy?  And  there  came 
to  mind  also  a  recollection  of  a  bitter  protest  I 
had  once  heard  from  the  lips  of  a  Parisian  who 
was  spending  a  miserable  fortnight  in  London, 
and  who  was  vociferous  (beyond  the  habit  of  his 
courteous  countrymen)  in  his  denunciation  of 
those  twin-delights  of  the  English  dinner-table, 
the  mint-sauce  with  which  the  British  desecrate 
their  otherwise  excellent  roast  lamb  and  the 
bread-sauce  with  which  they  contaminate  their 
otherwise  excellent  partridge.  This  exacerbated 
Frenchman  declared  that  these  two  aids  to  indi- 
gestion were  indefensible  outrages  on  the  gus- 
tatory organs  and  on  the  alimentary  canal. 

It  is  difficult  not  to  sympathize  more  or  less 
with  any  fellow  human  being  let  loose  in  a  for- 
eign land,  deprived  of  the  dishes  to  which  he  is 
accustomed  and  offended  by  culinary  offerings 
from  which  his  stomach  revolts.  Yet  it  is  diffi- 
cult also  not  to  confess  that  the  woful  complaint 
of  the  wandering  stranger,  be  he  Briton  in  the 
United  States,  American  in  France,  or  French- 
man in  the  British  Isles,  is  really  unreasonable. 
There  is  no  cosmopolitan  standard  of  right  and 
wrong  in  gastronomic  esthetics.  If  jugged  hare 
and  veal-and-ham  pie,  sauce  made  of  mint  and 
sauce  mashed  out  of  bread  happen  to  please  the 
186 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

palates  of  the  British,  who  shall  deny  them 
the  privilege  of  compounding  these  delectable 
dishes?  Caveat  emptor — let  the  foreigner  be- 
ware. It  is  for  him  to  guard  himself  against  in- 
sidious results  to  his  digestive  habits.  Every 
country  has  the  dishes  it  desires;  and  the  wan- 
derer will  do  well  to  experiment  cautiously  and 
to  be  guided  thereafter  by  this  experience. 
None  but  the  brave  deserve  the  fare  that  will 
satisfy  their  appetites.  The  one  wise  plan  is  to 
pick  out  of  the  local  dietary  the  few  (or  the 
many)  articles  which  may  please  (or  at  least  not 
offend)  our  own  likings,  resolutely  rejecting  all 
alien  dishes  offensive  to  our  taste,  no  matter 
how  volubly  these  outlandish  offerings  may  be 
vaunted  by  their  vendors.  There  is  no  more 
obligation  upon  a  Frenchman  in  Scotland  to 
partake  of  haggis,  than  there  is  upon  a  Scot  in 
Paris  to  make  a  meal  on  frogs'  legs. 

It  is  wise  also  to  recognize  the  fact  that  the 
cooking  of  every  country  has  merits  of  its  own, 
if  only  we  are  open-minded  enough  to  perceive 
them.  It  is  well  for  the  un traveled  American 
in  Paris  to  forego  the  hope  and  expectation  of 
chicken  fried  in  cream,  Maryland  style;  and  to 
risk  himself  in  the  exploration  of  poulet  saute  a 
la  Marengo;  probably  he  will  not  regret  this  gas- 
tronomic substitution.  It  is  well  also  for  the 
intrepid  English  voyager,  surveying  the  United 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

States  from  a  car- window,  to  overcome  his  first 
impression  and  to  taste  terrapin,  for  he  may 
find  it  "not  half  so  nasty  as  it  looks," — as  the 
Reverend  Mr.  Haweis  once  assured  his  wife. 
And  even  the  Gaul,  ill  at  ease  in  Great  Britain, 
will  profit  by  the  willingness  to  live  and  learn 
and  by  the  courage  which  sustains  faith;  he 
may  come  in  time  to  a  keen  appreciation  of  the 
chump-chop,  an  article  of  food  which  is  truly 
insular,  since  in  shape  it  looks  very  like  a  map 
of  England.  For  the  hardy  traveler  in  foreign 
parts,  risking  himself  in  strange  restaurants  with 
unknown  names  on  the  bill  of  fare,  there  is  no 
better  motto  than  "  no  thing  venture,  nothing 
have." 

"A  difference  of  taste  in  jests  is  a  great  strain 
on  the  affections,"  said  George  Eliot;  and  so  is 
a  difference  in  taste  in  dishes.  Tell  me  what  a 
man  laughs  at  and  I  will  tell  you  what  he  is; 
tell  me  also  what  he  eats,  and  I  can  at  least 
make  a  guess  as  to  what  manner  of  man  he  is. 
Perhaps  there  is  here  a  suggestion  for  the  League 
of  Nations;  and  one  clause  of  the  covenant  might 
assert  the  right  of  every  country  to  exercise  self- 
determination  in  all  matters  of  cookery.  The 
signers  of  this  treaty  of  peace  must  remember 
that  as  French  is  still  the  language  of  diplomacy, 
so  also  is  the  cookery  of  France  still  the  standard 
by  which  that  of  other  countries  is  measured; 
188 


COSMOPOLITAN   COOKERY 

and  the  friendly  foreigners  invading  Paris  will 
do  well  to  try  modestly  to  discover  the  reason 
why  the  culinary  artists  of  France  are  justly 
entitled  chefs. 

II 

IN  his  most  suggestive  discussion  of  'Food 
and  Feeding/  the  late  Sir  Henry  Thompson — 
the  distinguished  surgeon  of  London,  celebrated 
also  for  his  "octaves,"  as  he  called  his  little  din- 
ners of  eight — pointed  out  clearly  the  essential 
difference  between  the  racial  cookery  of  the 
French  and  that  of  the  English.  The  British 
Isles  have  a  damp  climate,  with  frequent  rain, 
resulting  in  luxuriant  grass  which  provides  an 
ideal  provender  for  cattle.  So  it  is  that  in  Eng- 
land beef  and  mutton  are  likely  to  be  the  best 
of  their  kind;  and  therefore  the  British  cook's 
sole  duty  is  to  present  these  meats  unadorned 
so  that  the  full  flavor  of  the  flesh  may  be  pre- 
served. This  is  to  say  that  the  proper  effort  of 
the  British  artist  in  the  kitchen  is  directed 
toward  the  stark  simplicity  which  gives  us  plain 
roast  beef  and  plain  roast  lamb,  the  naked 
beefsteak  and  the  unclothed  mutton  chop,  the 
bare  pheasant  and  the  bare  haunch  of  venison, 
each  of  them  sufficient  unto  itself  and  not  need- 
ing any  auxiliary  sauce.  British  cookery  at  its 
best  is  beauty  unadorned. 
189 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

France  is  less  rainy,  and  the  breeding  of  cat- 
tle has  not  been  so  careful  there  as  it  has  been 
in  England,  with  the  result  that  beef  and  mut- 
ton are  likely  to  be  somewhat  inferior;  and 
therefore  it  is  the  prime  duty  of  the  French 
artist  in  the  kitchen  to  stimulate  the  appetite 
and  help  it  to  be  satisfied  with  meats  which 
may  be  a  little  tough  and  even  stringy.  What 
is  true  of  beef  and  mutton  is  true  also  of  fish. 
Paris  is  three  or  four  hours  from  the  sea  and 
fish  does  not  always  arrive  there  in  the  most 
perfect  condition;  and  therefore  the  cook  is 
tempted  to  disguise  a  possible  lack  of  freshness 
by  the  piquancy  of  his  sauces.  London,  on  the 
other  hand,  is  in  fact  what  the  American  school- 
girl declared  it  to  be  in  her  geography  examina- 
tion; London  is  "the  capital  of  a  small  island 
off  the  coast  of  France."  Because  it  is  the 
capital  of  a  small  island,  "set  in  a  silver  sea," 
London  gets  its  fish  in  the  best  possible  condi- 
tion; and  therefore  it  is  the  duty  of  the  English 
cook  to  present  fish  with  the  inexorable  sim- 
plicity with  which  she  presents  beef  and  mut- 
ton. Woe  betide  her  if  she  venture  upon  any 
alien  sauce !  That  way  madness  lies ! 

It  is  the  old  antithesis  between  art  and  na- 
ture.   The  British  cook  is  excellent  when  she 
lets  well  enough  alone;  and  the  French  cook  is 
wise  in  his  generation  when  he  makes  the  best 
190 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

of  the  material  at  his  disposition.  "There  are 
nine-and-sixty  ways  of  writing  tribal  lays;  and 
every  single  one  of  them  is  right."  The  best- 
trained  palate  will  find  it  difficult  to  declare 
which  is  the  more  truly  satisfactory,  the  simple 
fried  sole  which  one  can  count  upon  anywhere 
and  everywhere  in  England  and  the  more  com- 
plicated Sole  Marguery  or  Sole  Mornay,  final  re- 
wards of  a  visit  to  Paris.  So  it  is  impossible  to 
accord  precedence  either  to  the  roast  beef  of  old 
England  or  to  the  filet  Chateaubriand  of  France, 
when  this  latter  dish  is  truly  what  it  pretends 
to  be, — that  is  to  say,  when  a  thick  tenderloin 
has  been  broiled  between  two  slices  of  inferior 
beef,  thus  retaining  all  its  own  juice  and  even 
absorbing  that  of  its  twin  coverings. 

In  France  cookery  (like  millinery)  is  one  of 
the  fine  arts;  and  art  is  long.  Complaint  is 
made  in  Paris  that  the  culinary  art  is  falling 
from  the  high  estate  to  which  it  had  attained  in 
the  nineteenth  century.  For  this  decadence,— 
if  decadence  there  be, — we  are  supplied  with  two 
reasons.  First,  because  the  cooks  themselves 
are  in  a  hurry  to  reap  the  reward  of  the  artist, 
and  are  not  now  willing  to  serve  the  long  and 
arduous  apprenticeship  which  is  the  only  road 
to  a  complete  mastery  of  the  mysteries  of  the 
craft.  And,  second,  because  the  public  is  also 
in  a  hurry,  indisposed  to  order  in  advance  and 
191 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

so  to  allow  the  full  time  necessary  for  the 
preparation  of  a  gastronomic  masterpiece.  Of 
course,  the  foreigners  who  flock  to  Paris  to  get 
their  fill  of  esthetic  sensations  are  the  worst 
offenders;  but  even  the  Parisians  themselves  are 
unreasonable  in  speeding  up  the  artist  and  in 
thus  compelling  him  to  improvise,  as  it  were,  to 
risk  a  hit-or-miss  effect,  instead  of  achieving  the 
flawless  execution  of  a  premeditated  and  per- 
fectly combined  bill  of  fare. 

French  cookery  also  suffers  in  another  way 
from  the  invasion  of  the  barbarians.  It  is  in 
Paris  that  the  culinary  art  has  attained  to  its 
culmination  and  achieved  the  apex  of  its  glory; 
it  is  only  in  Paris  that  the  student  of  high  aspira- 
tion and  of  ample  inspiration  can  acquire  its 
ultimate  secrets.  But  we  all  know  that  there 
are  now  abroad  in  the  world  a  host  of  "French 
cooks, "  falsely  so  called,  who  have  never  studied 
in  the  French  capital  and  who  are  not  even 
French, — being  therefore  devoid  of  the  innate 
gift  of  the  Gaul.  These  out-landers,  if  we  may 
so  term  them,  these  intruders  into  the  temple, 
are  likely  to  lack  both  the  native  endowment 
and  the  solid  instruction  without  which  there  is 
only  vanity  and  vexation  of  spirit.  They  may 
on  occasion  cling  to  the  letter  of  the  law;  but 
they  are  wanting  in  understanding  of  its  soul. 


192 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 


III 

I  HAVE  sought  to  show  that  if  the  Parisian 
despises  the  cookery  of  the  Londoner,  it  is  be- 
cause he  has  failed  to  appreciate  its  peculiar  ex- 
cellence, that  is  to  say  its  simplicity.  And  it 
would  not  be  more  difficult  to  explain  that  the 
Englishman  is  in  error  when  he  condemns  the 
cookery  of  the  American.  There  is  bad  cook- 
ing a  plenty  in  the  United  States,  as  there  is 
also  in  Great  Britain;  often  due  to  an  ignorant 
effort  to  imitate  the  inimitable  art  of  the  French. 
But  just  as  English  cooking  is  good  when  it  con- 
forms to  its  own  traditions,  so  American  cookery 
can  be  excellent  in  its  own  way.  Is  the  bouilla- 
baisse of  Marseilles  really  more  alluring  than  the 
clam  chowder  of  Cape  Cod? 

Of  course,  if  the  French  and  British  travelers 
in  the  United  States  expect  to  get  their  own 
special  culinary  successes,  they  are  foredoomed 
to  disappointment  We  cannot  set  before  them 
either  fried  sole  or  sole  Mornay,  because  unkind 
fate  has  deprived  us  of  the  sole  itself.  But  we 
can  proffer  to  them  the  planked  shad — "and 
what  better  dish  can  there  be?"  We  may  go 
further  and  ask  if  any  venturesome  alien  has 
really  the  right  to  look  down  on  one  of  the  hum- 
blest of  our  dishes,  corned  beef  hash,  when  it 

193 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

has  been  compounded  by  competent  hands? 
And  who  shall  decry  the  equally  humble  codfish- 
ball,  when  its  flattened  globe  is  the  work  of  a 
born  cook?  It  is  our  misfortune  now  that  we 
can  no  longer  rest  our  case  on  the  canvas-back 
duck  of  sainted  memory,  departed  and  deeply 
mourned  and  so  nearly  forgotten  that  the  tale 
is  told  of  a  Londoner,  at  his  first  dinner  in  a 
New  York  hotel,  asking  for  "the  celebrated  can- 
vas-back clam." 

I  doubt  if  any  one  has  yet  done  justice  to  the 
variety  and  to  the  merit  of  our  sweet  dishes. 
Has  any  other  country  in  the  world  anything  to 
compare  with  the  strawberry  short-cake,  when 
it  is  truly  short-cake  and  not  sponge-cake,  when 
it  is  deluged  with  real  cream  and  not  desecrated 
with  whipped  cream?  And  consider  for  a  mo- 
ment that  invention  of  the  Puritans  and  the 
Pilgrim  Fathers,  baked  Indian  pudding,  with  its 
indigenous  flavor  enhanced  by  hard  sauce.  The 
Pilgrim  Mother  who  originated  that  abiding  de- 
light deserves  a  monument  more  enduring  than 
brass;  and  yet,  sad  to  relate,  this  truly  Ameri- 
can invention  is  unknown  to  the  benighted  Brit- 
ons— that  is,  if  we  may  believe  the  possibly 
apocryphal  tale  of  the  English  lady  who  pro- 
tested when  she  first  heard  of  this  dish, — "Baked 
Indian  ?  How  horrible !  I  knew  you  Americans 

194 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

were  savages — but  I  didn't  suspect  that  you 
were  cannibals ! " 

Then  there  are  our  pies,  unhonored  and  un- 
sung,— except  by  Eugene  Field  who  once  rimed 
a  lilting  lyric  in  praise  of  'Apple  Pie  and  Cheese' : 

Full  many  a  sinful  notion 

Conceived  of  foreign  powers 
Has  come  across  the  ocean 

To  harm  this  land  of  ours; 
And  heresies  called  fashions 

Have  modesty  effaced, 
And  baleful,  morbid  passions 

Corrupt  our  native  taste. 
O  tempora !     O  mores ! 

What  profanations  these 
That  seek  to  dim  the  glories 

Of  Apple  Pie  and  Cheese. 

The  American  apple  pie  is  not  the  British 
apple-tart, — far  from  it.  In  fact  the  British 
apple-tart  is  closely  akin  to  what  we  know  as 
the  "deep  dish  apple  pie.'7  Nor  is  the  Ameri- 
can apple  pie  at  all  like  the  French  tourte  aux 
pommes  which  is  a  thin  circular  disk,  with  a 
raised  rim  and  no  upper  crust.  The  American 
lemon  meringue  pie  has  been  degraded  and  dis- 
graced by  base  and  fraudulent  imitations,  seem- 
ingly concocted  out  of  glue  and  soapsuds  and 
shoe  leather;  but  when  it  has  been  created 
by  an  inspired  ebony  artist  with  kinky  curls 
bound  up  in  a  bandanna,  it  is  indeed  a  good 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

creature.  And  there  is  punkin  pie,  scorned  by 
the  highbrow  but  none  the  less  welcome  when 
it  also  is  due  to  the  deft  touch  of  a  sable  crafts- 
woman.  A  friend  of  mine,  long  deprived  of  this 
delicacy,  dear  to  his  New  England  boyhood,  re- 
cently saw  it  upon  the  bill  of  fare  of  one  of  the 
fashionable  hotels  of  New  York;  and  he  was 
about  to  order  it  when  he  hesitated  in  doubt 
whether  its  adequate  preparation  was  a  possible 
feat  for  the  presumably  French  pastry-cook  of 
that  sumptuous  hostelry.  He  was  promptly 
reassured  by  the  headwaiter:  "We  have  an 
American  to  make  our  punkin  pies,  and  what's 
more,  he's  a  coon ! " 

I  confess  that  I  wish  I  knew  which  pie  it  was, 
punkin  or  apple,  lemon  meringue  or  mince,  that 
Emerson  ordered  on  his  trip  to  California,  evok- 
ing from  a  young  lady  in  the  party  the  surprised 
question,  "Why,  Mr.  Emerson,  do  you  eat  pie?" 
To  which  the  benignant  philosopher  is  recorded 
to  have  responded,  "My  dear  young  lady,  what 
is  pie  for?" 

We  do  not  often  pause  to  recall  the  variety  of 
the  foodstuffs  unknown  to  Europe  until  after 
Columbus  had  returned  from  his  venturesome 
voyage  across  the  Western  Ocean.  There  is  to- 
bacco, if  that  can  be  called  a  foodstuff  (which 
may  be  doubtful);  no  European  or  Asiatic  or 
African  could  smoke  until  the  Nicotian  weed 
196 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

had  been  acclimated.  There  is  the  sugar-cane; 
no  Greek  and  no  Roman  could  put  sugar  in  his 
beverages  until  after  a  method  had  been  discov- 
ered for  making  it  out  of  the  juice  of  the  cane; 
and  the  Roman  and  the  Greek  could  enjoy 
only  such  sweet  dishes  as  might  be  sweetened 
by  honey.  Even  to  this  day  maple-sugar  is 
almost  unknown  in  Europe;  indeed  it  is  so 
little  known  that  Thackeray  in  the  first  edi- 
tion of  the  f  Virginians/  did  not  hesitate  to  de- 
scribe it  as  being  garnered  in  the  autumn! 
There  is  the  tomato  also,  and  the  potato  and 
the  turkey  (falsely  believed  to  have  come  from 
the  country  from  which  it  borrowed  its  name). 
There  is  maize,  which  we  call  Indian  corn  and 
which  is  our  most  important  food-crop,  more  im- 
portant even  than  wheat.  It  is  used  by  the 
English  only  rarely,  under  the  name  of  corn- 
flour; and  it  is  so  unfamiliar  to  the  Irish  that 
when  cargoes  of  it  were  sent  over  from  America 
during  the  famine,  the  peasants  died  because 
they  did  not  know  how  to  make  bread  from 
what  they  termed  "yellow  meal."  Only  in 
Italy  has  Indian  corn  been  made  as  useful  as  in 
its  native  land.  Apparently  the  Italians  have 
never  learnt  how  to  prepare  corn-bread;  but  one 
of  the  most  popular  dishes  of  the  peasantry  is 
polenta,  which  is  their  equivalent  for  our  hasty 
pudding.  When  Joel  Barlow  was  wandering 
197 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

around  Europe  a  century  ago  he  recognized  our 
homely  American  dish;  and  he  sang  its  praises 
in  his  unpretending  poem,  the  '  Hasty  Pudding/ 
which  lingers  now  in  many  a  memory  ignorant 
of  his  ambitious  epic,  the  'Columbiad': 

The  sweets  of  Hasty  Pudding.     Come,  dear  bowl, 
Guide  o'er  my  palate,  and  inspire  my  soul ! 
The  milk  beside  thee,  smoking  from  the  kine, 
Its  substance  mingle,  married  in  with  thine, 
Shall  cool  and  temper  the  superior  heat, 
And  save  the  pains  of  blowing  while  I  eat. 

But  man,  more  fickle,  the  bold  license  claims, 
In  different  realms  to  give  thee  different  names. 
Thee  the  soft  nations  round  the  warm  Levant 
Polenta  call;  the  French  of  course,  polente. 
E'en  in  thy  native  regions  now,  I  blush 
To  hear  the  Pennsylvanians  call  thee  Mush  I 
On  Hudson's  banks,  where  men  of  Belgic  spawn 
Insult  and  eat  thee  by  the  name  Suppawn. 
All  spurious  appellations,  void  of  truth; 
I've  better  known  thee  from  my  earliest  youth — 
Thy  name  is  Hasty  Pudding!    Thus  my  sire 
Was  wont  to  greet  thee,  fuming  from  his  fire ! 


IV 

CHRISTMAS  cheer  comes  once  a  year,  so  the 

old  saying  asserted.    But  will  it  come  even  once, 

now  that  we  are  in  the  fell  clutch  of  prohibition  ? 

Will  Christmas  be  as  cheerful  as  it  used  to  be, 

198 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

when  the  mince-pie  lacks  its  full  flavor  and  when 
the  blue  flame  will  never  again  flicker  about  the 
base  of  the  plum  pudding?  If  our  island  an- 
cestors had  voted  England  dry  a  century  ago, 
Washington  Irving  could  never  have  written  his 
appetizing  account  of  the  Christmas  dinner;  and 
Charles  Dickens  would  not  have  been  able  to 
take  the  hint  from  his  American  predecessor, 
and  to  interlard  his  bold  and  broad  narratives 
with  incessant  descriptions  of  eating  and  drink- 
ing. How  many  hearty  feasts  Dickens  set  be- 
fore his  readers  with  unfailing  gusto ! 

Doctor  Holmes  declared  that  we  could  gage 
the  rate  of  respiration  of  the  poets  by  noting 
the  meters  they  severally  preferred;  the  writers 
of  octosyllabic  verse  being  swifter  breathers  than 
their  brethren  who  chose  the  stately  and  straight- 
backed  pentameter.  Perhaps  we  can  guess  at 
the  relative  digestive  apparatus  of  the  novelists 
by  the  frequency  with  which  they  deal  with 
foods  and  feeding.  Who  can  doubt  that  Dickens 
had  a  stout  stomach  and  that  he  was  a  trencher- 
man to  be  compared  only  with  Rabelais?  And 
Thackeray  was  the  author  of  '  Memorials  of 
Gormandizing/  The  records  of  the  repasts  we 
find  in  many  an  English  novel  make  our  mouths 
water;  and  even  the  poets  have  left  us  carols  of 
cookery  and  recipes  in  rime, — of  which  latter  the 
most  famous  is  Sydney  Smith's  recipe  for  a 
199 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

salad;  with  the  sublime  assurance  in  its  final 
quatrain: 

Then  tho  green  turtle  fail,  tho  venison's  tough, 
And  ham  and  turkey  are  not  boiled  enough, 
Serenely  full  the  epicure  may  say, 
"Fate  cannot  harm  me — I  have  dined  to-day !" 

Yet  we  cannot  disguise  the  fact  that  there  is 
monotony  in  the  menu,  that  our  meals  lack 
variety  whatever  the  skill  of  our  cooks,  that  we 
are  confined  to  the  flesh  of  bipeds  and  of  quad- 
rupeds,— except  when  we  prefer  the  footless  fish. 
A  new  dish  is  as  great  a  variety  as  a  new  sin. 
There  are  now  no  new  worlds  for  the  gastro- 
nomic traveller  to  explore.  We  do  not  crave  the 
blubber,  dear  to  the  dwellers  near  the  North 
Pole;  nor  can  darkest  Africa  provide  us  with 
the  baked  elephant's  foot,  which  I  have  longed 
to  taste  ever  since  my  early  boyhood,  when  I 
read  about  it  in  Ballantyne's  '  Gorilla  Hunters.' 
And  in  those  same  youthful  years  I  wanted  a 
slice  of  buffalo-hump,  a  delicacy  now  impossible 
of  attainment,  altho  it  was  an  everyday  dish 
for  the  heroes  of  Edward  S.  Ellis's  dime  novels, 
which  delighted  the  hearts  of  the  lads  of  my 
time. 

Here  in  America  we  have  lost  the  canvas-back 
duck;  and  we  have  never  had  the  sole.  We 
may  read  about  them;  we  may  peruse  the  text- 
200 


COSMOPOLITAN  COOKERY 

books  which  prescribe  the  proper  methods  of 
cooking  them;  but  we  cannot  hope  to  feed  on 
them.  Still,  there  is  comfort  of  a  kind  in  the 
cook-books  themselves.  Age  cannot  stale  them 
nor  custom  wither  their  infinite  variety.  There 
was  a  picture  in  Punch  long,  long  ago,  which 
showed  us  a  Lady  Bountiful  visiting  one  of  her 
pensioners  and  asking  if  this  dilapidated  old 
woman  had  read  a  cook-book  which  had  been 
bestowed  upon  her.  And  to  this  question  the 
pensioner  responded,  "Yes,  my  lady,  I  read  it, 
— but  I'd  rather  have  had  the  ingridiments." 

In  default  of  the  ingredients,  we  must  seek 
solace  in  the  cook-book  itself,  not  so  nourishing 
it  may  be,  yet  awakening  delectable  memories. 
She  was  a  sensible  person,  that  impoverished 
gentlewoman,  who  had  trained  herself  to  find 
satisfaction  in  sipping  her  tea  and  munching  her 
toast,  while  she  gave  a  loose  to  her  imagination 
by  reading  the  recipes  of  the  most  expensive 
dishes  as  amply  written  out  by  a  former  chief 
of  the  kitchen  of  Her  Majesty,  Queen  of  England 
and  Empress  of  India. 

(1919.) 


201 


XII 

ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND 
WORKING  TOO  FAST 


XII 

ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND 
WORKING  TOO  FAST 


I  HAVE  recently  read  an  article  in  which  it 
was  asserted  that  American  fiction  is  in  a 
parlous  state,  because  our  story-tellers  write  too 
much  and  write  too  fast;  and  I  am  moved  to 
file  a  protest.  I  dispute  the  assertion,  and  I 
decry  the  validity  of  the  reasons  advanced  in 
support  of  it. 

First  of  all  we  need  to  remember  always  that 
contemporary  criticism  about  contemporary  lit- 
erature is  very  rarely  important  or  significant. 
We  cannot  see  the  forest  for  the  trees;  we  lack 
the  perspective  of  time;  we  are  unable  to  antici- 
pate the  ultimate  result  of  the  slow  but  sure 
process  of  selection  which  separates  the  chaff 
from  the  wheat  and  which  results  in  casting 
aside  a  host  of  writers  often  of  a  salient  promi- 
nence in  the  eyes  of  their  immediate  contempo- 
raries. We  may,  every  one  of  us,  have  our  indi- 
vidual opinion  as  to  the  probable  permanence  of 
present-day  reputations;  but  we  can,  no  one  of 
205 


ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND  WORKING  TOO  FAST 

us,  feel  any  certainty  that  this  individual  opinion 
is  going  to  be  justified  by  the  communal  deci- 
sion of  the  next  generation.  The  writers  whom 
we  acclaim  loudly  may  be  lost  to  sight  beneath 
the  wave  of  oblivion  half  a  century  from  now; 
and  the  writers  to  whom  we  do  not  deign  to  give 
a  thought  may  then  have  proved  themselves  to 
be  possessed  of  the  one  thing  necessary  for  sur- 
vival. f Robinson  Crusoe'  and  ' Pilgrim's  Prog- 
ress' won  instant  popularity,  yet  they  were 
altogether  ignored  by  the  self-appointed  dis- 
pensers of  critical  approval. 

Sir  Philip  Sidney  thought  that  the  English 
drama  was  beneath  contempt;  and  it  was  just 
about  to  flower  out  exuberantly.  Guy  Patin 
thought  that  the  French  drama  was  in  a  very 
lamentable  condition;  and  it  had  just  been  illu- 
mined by  the  masterpieces  of  Corneille,  Moliere 
and  Racine.  In  the  late  Professor  Lounsbury's 
posthumous  history  of  the  'Life  and  Times  of 
Tennyson,'  there  is  this  quotation  from  Macau- 
lay's  diary,  under  date  of  March  9,  1850:  "It  is 
odd  that  the  last  twenty-five  years  which  have 
witnessed  the  greatest  progress  ever  made  in 
physical  science — the  greatest  victories  ever 
achieved  by  mind  over  matter — should  have 
produced  hardly  a  volume  that  will  be  remem- 
bered in  1900."  And  Lounsbury  follows  this 
with  another  quotation  from  a  letter  of  Macau- 
206 


ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND  WORKING  TOO  FAST 

lay's  written  a  few  months  later,  in  which  the 
writer  declared  that  Sir  Henry  Taylor's  'Philip 
Van  Artevelde'  "is  still,  in  my  opinion,  the  best 
poem  that  the  last  thirty  years  have  produced." 
Then  Professor  Lounsbury  asked:  "Could  a 
more  suggestive  illustration  be  furnished  of  the 
worthlessness  of  contemporary  criticism  of  the 
productions  of  the  imagination?  The  quarter 
of  a  century,  whose  intellectual  poverty  was  so 
strongly  pointed  out  by  Macaulay,  had^witnessed 
the  production  of  much  of  the  best  work  of  both 
Tennyson  and  Browning  in  poetry;  of  Dickens 
and  Thackeray  and  Carlyle  in  prose;  not  to  speak 
of  no  small  number  of  writers  like  Bulwer,  Dis- 
raeli, Kingsley  and  others  who  still  continue  to 
be  remembered  and  read.  " 

When  men  of  the  acumen  and  authority  of 
Sidney,  Guy  Patin,  and  Macaulay  have  thus  re- 
vealed their  inability  to  see  what  was  before 
their  eyes,  modesty  suggests  that  those  of  us 
who  are  less  amply  endowed  with  vision  should 
be  cautious  in  expressing  confidence  in  our  own 
insight  in  regard  to  our  immediate  contempo- 
raries. Especially  ought  we  to  be  careful  not 
to  let  our  keen  perception  of  the  manifest  and 
manifold  defects  in  the  average  novel  blind  us 
to  the  probability  that  there  are  also  not  a  few 
novels  above  the  average  and  free  from  the  more 
glaring  of  these  deficiencies.  There  is  no  need 
207 


ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND  WORKING  TOO  FAST 

to  deny  that  the  average  American  novel  of  to- 
day is  a  poor  thing;  so  is  the  average  British 
novel;  so  is  the  average  French  novel;  and  so 
was  the  average  American  and  British  and 
French  novel  of  the  last  generation  and  of  the 
generation  before  the  last.  The  immense  ma- 
jority of  contemporary  novels  in  any  language 
and  in  any  epoch  are  for  immediate  consumption 
only.  They  serve  their  temporary  purpose,  well 
or  ill;  and  then  they  are  forgotten,  as  their 
places  are  taken  by  other  novels,  no  better  and 
no  worse. 

It  is  quite  possible  that  at  the  present  mo- 
ment American  fiction  is  in  the  trough  of  the 
waves  and  that  we  do  not  happen  to  possess 
just  now  any  writer  of  fiction  whose  work  will 
be  cherished  fifty  years  hence.  And  on  the 
other  hand  it  is  also  possible,  indeed  it  is  highly 
probable,  that  more  than  one  of  the  novels  pro- 
duced here  in  the  United  States  in  the  first  fif- 
teen years  of  this  twentieth  century  will  emerge 
triumphant  from  out  of  the  watery  waste  of  the 
average  novel  of  this  decade  and  a  half. 

II 

BUT  whether  or  not  our  story-tellers  are  as 
unsatisfactory  as  was  alleged  in  the  article  I  had 
read,  there  is  no  reason  for  accepting  the  ex- 

208 


ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND  WORKING  TOO  FAST 

planation  that  their  failure  is  due  to  undue 
haste  and  to  undue  productivity.  Underlying 
this  explanation  is  the  unexpressed  conviction 
that  the  best  work  is  possible  only  to  those  who 
labor  slowly  and  to  those  who  do  not  produce 
abundantly.  This  is  an  opinion  cherished  by 
many  critics,  who  find  justification  for  their  faith 
in  the  fact  that  the  most  prolific  authors  are  fre- 
quently also  the  most  slovenly  in  style  and  the 
most  happy-go-lucky  in  structure.  No  doubt, 
there  are  many  works  of  fiction  which  would  be 
better  than  they  are  if  the  author  had  taken 
more  pains — and  he  might  have  taken  more 
pains  if  he  had  taken  more  time. 

Yet  the  more  familiar  we  are  with  the  history 
of  literature  and  with  the  biography  of  authors, 
the  less  inclined  we  are  to  accept  this  view  un- 
reservedly. It  is  true  that  Time  is  jealous  and 
is  likely  to  destroy  that  which  is  done  with  his 
aid.  It  is  true  also  that  there  is  today  as  al- 
ways a  superabundance  of  hasty  work  turned 
out  by  writers  who  are  rushing  through  the  story 
they  have  in  hand  so  that  they  can  start  as  soon 
as  possible  on  the  story  they  have  in  mind.  But 
it  is  not  true  that  all  the  masters  have  written 
slowly  and  that  they  have  produced  only  after  a 
long  and  laborious  gestation.  Whatever  cate- 
gorical dogmatism  may  say  to  the  contrary,  it  is 
a  matter  of  common  knowledge  that  fecundity 
209 


ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND  WORKING  TOO  FAST 

of  production  and  swiftness  of  execution  are 
often  characteristics  of  genius — and  even  of 
talent. 

Ben  Jonson  boasted  that  he  had  given  two 
years  to  a  single  play;  and  two  years  was  also 
the  time  which  Ibsen  devoted  to  each  of  his 
later  social  dramas.  But  Jonson  and  Ibsen, 
important  as  they  are,  do  not  rank  with  the  su- 
preme masters  of  the  drama,  Sophocles,  Shak- 
spere  and  Moliere.  "The  dramatic  activity  of 
Sophocles  extended  over  sixty- two  years,"  so  the 
late  Professor  Butcher  recorded;  and  the  great- 
est of  Greek  dramatists  is  believed  to  have  com- 
posed one  hundred  and  thirteen  plays — very 
nearly  two  a  year,  a  productivity  four  times  that 
of  Ibsen  and  Jonson.  The  dramatic  activity 
of  Shakspere  extended  over  twenty  years;  and 
he  wrote  thirty-nine  or  forty  plays — again  about 
two  a  year.  The  dramatic  activity  of  Moliere 
extended  over  fifteen  years,  and  he  wrote  about 
thirty  plays — once  more  about  two  a  year.  The 
only  deduction  from  these  figures  is  obvious 
enough.  Ben  Jonson  and  Ibsen  were  right  in 
taking  two  years  to  a  play,  because  by  so  doing 
they  were  able  to  put  forth  their  utmost  strength ; 
and  Sophocles,  Shakspere  and  Moliere  were  also 
right  in  turning  out  two  plays  a  year,  because 
by  so  doing  they  were  able  to  reveal  more  amply 
their  more  copious  fecundity  and  their  swifter 
certainty  of  execution. 

210 


ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND  WORKING  TOO  FAST 

The  most  popular  play  of  the  younger  Dumas, 
the  'Dame  aux  Camelias,'  was  dramatised  from 
his  own  story,  in  a  single  week;  and  the  most 
popular  play  of  Victor  Hugo,  'Hernani/  with  its 
sonorous  and  resplendent  verse,  was  actually 
written — it  had  previously  been  plotted  in 
a  complete  scenario — in  exactly  four  weeks. 
Would  either  of  these  plays  have  been  any  bet- 
ter if  it  had  cost  its  author  the  protracted  labor 
of  two  years  ?  It  is  current  gossip  that  a  promi- 
nent British  novelist  of  our  day  wrote  her 
stories  seven  times  before  she  was  satisfied  to  let 
them  leave  her  hands.  She  might  rewrite  them 
seventy  times  seven  without  breathing  the 
breath  of  life  into  her  graven  images;  and  the 
suggestion  may  be  ventured  that  if  she  had 
dared  to  publish  the  first  draft  of  any  one  of  her 
devitalised  revisions,  perhaps  it  might  have  been 
found  to  disclose  a  spontaneity  sadly  lacking  in 
her  novels  as  we  have  been  permitted  to  peruse 
them. 

The  writer  of  the  article  I  had  read  soars  into 
a  dithyrambic  rhapsody  over  the  thirty  years 
which  Flaubert  gave  to  'Madame  Bo  vary';  and 
there  is  no  denying  that  'Madame  Bo  vary '  is 
one  of  the  many  masterpieces  of  the  art  of  fiction. 
But  it  is  a  masterpiece  not  solely  or  even  chiefly 
because  of  its  finish  and  its  polish.  No  master- 
piece has  ever  been  achieved  by  the  external  ac- 
cessories of  finish  and  polish.  Books  cannot  live 
211 


ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND  WORKING  TOO  FAST 

by  style  alone.  '  Madame  Bo  vary'  is  great  pri- 
marily because  of  its  content,  of  its  author's  in- 
quest upon  human  nature,  of  his  insight  into 
character.  Moreover,  when  all  is  said,  '  Ma- 
dame B ovary'  is  not  easy  reading — in  the  sense 
that f Vanity  Fair/  the  'Scarlet  Letter,'  and  the 
'Rise  of  Silas  Lapham'  are  easy  reading.  It  is 
a  painful  pleasure  we  take  in  its  perusal;  and 
the  joyless  toil  that  went  to  its  making  op- 
presses the  reader,  forced  to  share  the  sore  trav- 
ail of  the  author. 

Every  artist  must  obey  the  law  of  his  own 
being.  He  can  do  his  best  only  in  accordance 
with  the  self-imposed  restrictions  which  he  has 
found  to  be  most  helpful.  Only  by  infinite  toil 
could  Flaubert  achieve  the  austere  simplicity  of 
'Madame  B  ovary/  and  therefore  he  was  com- 
pelled to  infinite  toil.  Because  this  meticulous 
method  suited  him,  he  sought  to  impose  it  upon 
Maupassant,  to  whose  exuberant  temperament 
it  was  entirely  uncongenial.  What  the  pupil  re- 
tained from  the  master's  teaching  was  an  abid- 
ing respect  for  art,  for  the  art  of  construction 
and  for  the  art  of  writing.  The  personal  method 
of  the  master  the  pupil  rejected,  fortunately  for 
himself  and  for  his  readers.  I  have  read  some- 
where that  Maupassant  once  came  downstairs 
to  the  mid-day  breakfast  with  a  smile  of  satisfac- 
tion on  his  face  and  said  to  his  mother  that  he 
212 


ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND  WORKING  TOO  FAST 

had  just  made  three  hundred  francs,  explaining 
that  he  had  written  a  short  story,  the  'Necklace/ 
Now,  in  its  own  way,  'La  Parure'  is  as  un- 
deniably a  masterpiece  as  '  Madame  B  ovary ' 
itself. 

Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling  once  told  me  that  his 
amusing  narrative  of  midnight  misadventure, 
'Brugglesmith,'  had  been  conceived,  composed, 
and  completed  on  the  evening  of  the  day  when 
he  had  heard  from  Mr.  Oliver  Herford  the  anec- 
dote which  suggested  it.  And  Mr.  Edwin  Le- 
fevre  informs  me  that  he  composed  '  Woman  and 
Her  Bonds'  at  a  single  sitting  and  before  break- 
fast. Now,  ' Woman  and  Her  Bonds'  is  the 
best  of  its  author's  'Wall  Street  Stories';  it  is 
one  of  the  best  of  American  short-stories,  in- 
genious in  invention,  adroit  in  construction, 
swift  in  movement  and  clear  in  style. 

It  would  be  easy  to  heap  up  illustrations  from 
the  other  arts  to  show  that  speed  is  not  neces- 
sarily a  danger.  Mr.  Sargent  painted  'Carna- 
tion, Lily,  Lily,  Rose'  in  one  long  English  twi- 
light and  then  scraped  it  off  the  next  morning 
only  to  paint  it  again  that  afternoon  and  to  re- 
move it  the  following  day,  until  after  half-a-dozen 
sighting  shots  he  hit  the  bull's  eye  and  rested 
content  with  the  result  of  the  final  evening's 
work.  The  'Barber  of  Seville,'  which  has  sur- 
vived for  now  exactly  a  century,  was  composed 
213 


ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND  WORKING  TOO  FAST 

and  produced  in  less  than  a  month,  after  Ros- 
sini had  composed  and  produced  in  the  preced- 
ing month  an  opera  which  was  an  immediate 
and  total  failure.  Verdi  wrote  'Rigoletto'  in 
six  weeks;  and  Schubert  wrote  his  song,  the  'Erl 
Konig/  in  one  afternoon. 

But  there  is  no  need  to  multiply  illustrations. 
Fecundity  and  celerity  of  execution  may  be  ele- 
ments of  strength.  Many  men  of  genius  have 
produced  abundantly,  incessantly  and  swiftly. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  does  not  follow  that  a 
man  who  produces  abundantly,  incessantly  and 
swiftly  is  necessarily  a  man  of  genius.  There 
are  now,  there  always  have  been  and  there 
always  will  be,  men  who  write  too  fast  and 
who  write  too  much,  because  they  are  writing 
chiefly  with  a  desire  to  make  money.  These 
men  write  themselves  out  and  they  write  them- 
selves down;  and  there  is  no  need  to  waste  words 
over  what  they  write  or  to  reprove  them  for 
what  they  do  and  for  how  they  do  it.  They 
are  beneath  criticism,  not  because  they  write 
too  much  and  too  fast  or  chiefly  for  money,  but 
because  they  are  what  they  are.  Their  failure 
is  not  due  to  a  defective  method;  it  is  due  to  a 
deficient  character. 

After  all,  there  are  nine  and  sixty  ways  of 
writing  tribal  lays  and  every  single  one  of  them 
is  right.  Balzac  drafted  and  amplified  and 
214 


ON  WORKING  TOO  MUCH  AND  WORKING  TOO  FAST 

amended  and  was  forever  revising  his  proofs; 
and  so  best,  since  that  was  the  process  most 
profitable  to  him.  Scott  wrote  at  white  heat, 
not  knowing  when  he  began  where  he  was  going 
to  end;  and  so  best  again,  since  he  was  an  im- 
proviser  of  genius,  incapable  of  inexorable  self- 
criticism.  Either  of  these  great  novelists  would 
have  been  wrong  if  he  had  tried  to  compel  him- 
self to  work  in  accord  with  the  method  of  the 
other. 

So  long  as  the  barrel  is  full  it  does  not  matter 
whether  the  water  is  allowed  to  drip  drop  by 
drop  from  the  spigot  or  whether  it  is  permitted 
to  gush  generously  from  the  bung-hole.  And  so 
long  as  the  barrel  is  able  to  replenish  itself  un- 
ceasingly from  the  spring,  it  does  not  matter 
how  frequently  the  water  is  drawn  off. 

(1916.) 


215 


XIII 
THE  MODERNITY  OF  MOLlfiRE 


[This  address  was  delivered  in  April,  1922,  at  a 
meeting  of  the  American  Academy  of  Arts  and  Letters, 
commemorating  the  three  hundredth  anniversary  of 
the  work  of  Moliere  and  honored  by  the  presence  of 
two  representatives  of  the  Academic  Francaise.] 


XIII 
THE  MODERNITY  OF  MOLlfiRE 

MONSIEUR  DONNAY  and  Monsieur  Chev- 
rillon  have  come  three  thousand  miles  to 
take  part  in  our  tribute  to  the  genius  of  a  man 
who  was  born  three  hundred  years  ago.  Our 
invitation  and  their  crossing  of  the  Atlantic  bear 
witness  to  the  fact  that  the  fame  of  Moliere  is 
both  enduring  and  world-wide.  No  one  of  the 
makers  of  French  literature  is  more  typically, 
more  fundamentally  French  than  he;  and  yet 
here,  in  a  city  almost  unknown  and  absolutely 
unimportant  three  centuries  ago,  we  are  today 
assembled  to  do  him  honor  and  to  acclaim  him 
as  the  master  of  modern  comedy. 

He  was  not  only  a  man  of  his  own  country, 
he  was  a  man  of  his  own  time.  In  the  early 
years  of  the  long  reign  of  Louis  XIV  he  came  a 
little  later  than  Corneille  and  a  little  earlier  than 
Racine;  and  neither  of  them  is  as  representative 
of  that  glittering  epoch  as  Moliere; — and  yet 
half-a-dozen  or  half-a-score  of  his  thirty  plays 
are  alive  today  in  all  the  freshness  of  their  eter- 
nal youth.  He  is  not  for  his  own  country  alone 
219 


THE  MODERNITY  OF  MOLIERE 

but  for  all  civilization;  and  he  was  not  for  his 
own  age  only,  but  for  ours  also.  To  say  this  is 
to  say  that  he  possesses  the  two  indispensable 
qualities  of  a  classic:  his  masterpieces  have  a 
large  measure  of  permanence  and  a  large  mea- 
sure of  universality. 

I  have  studied  him  lovingly  for  half-a-century, 
and  as  I  came  to  a  more  intimate  acquaintance 
with  his  writings  and  to  a  keener  appreciation 
of  the  man  himself,  I  felt  more  and  more  the 
modernness  of  his  work.  No  doubt,  it  bears  un- 
mistakably the  impress  of  his  own  time, — all  mas- 
terpieces do  that,  of  course,  those  of  Sophocles 
and  Shakspere  no  less  than  those  of  Moliere. 
Yet  he  is  more  modern  than  the  great  Greek 
tragedian  who  lived  two  thousand  years  ago, 
and  more  modern  even  than  the  great  English- 
man, who  wrote  both  comedies  and  tragedies,  and 
who  died  only  six  years  before  the  great  French- 
man was  born.  The  great  Spaniard  Calderon 
survived  Moliere  eight  years;  and  his  plays 
seem  to  us  almost  archaic  in  their  stagecraft 
and  in  their  spirit, — whereas  the  comedies  of 
Moliere  are  modern  both  in  their  form  and  in 
their  content. 

The  modernity  of  his  form  is  obvious  enough, 
and  he  is  the  master  of  modern  comedy,  not 
only  because  he  realized  better  than  any  prede- 
cessor in  any  country  what  the  true  province  of 
220 


THE  MODERNITY  OF  MOLIERE 

comedy  was  and  what  were  its  possibilities  and 
its  limitations  but  also  because  he  wrote  for 
the  modern  playhouse,  with  its  roof,  with  its 
artificial  lighting,  with  its  scenery,  with  its 
seated  spectators.  The  pattern  he  devised  for 
this  modern  playhouse  is  the  pattern  employed 
by  the  playwrights  of  every  European  language, 
even  though  they  may  be  totally  unaware  of  the 
debt  they  owe  to  him.  Shakspere's  plays  have 
to  be  modified  to  adjust  themselves  to  our  thea- 
ters; Moliere's  do  not  demand  any  rearrange- 
ment, not  a  single  transposition  nor  a  single 
omission.  Sheridan  could  not  have  plotted  the 
'School  for  Scandal'  if  Moliere  had  not  plotted 
the  'Misanthrope'  and  the  'Femmes  Savantes.' 
Ibsen  could  not  have  put  together  the  'League 
of  Youth'  and  the  'Pillars  of  Society'  if  Moliere 
had  not  devised  'Tartuffe.' 

He  had  profited  by  his  early  study  of  Plautus 
and  Terence,  as  they  had  profited  by  their 
study  of  Menander;  but  the  Greek  and  the  two 
Latins  in  their  turn,  had  progressed  only  to 
the  play  of  intrigue,  the  comedy  of  anecdote; 
they  were  not  equipt  to  achieve  the  comedy  of 
manners,  the  comedy  of  character,  the  social 
drama,  the  play  which  while  it  makes  us  laugh 
also  makes  us  think.  Their  field  was  narrowly 
restricted  and  the  hampering  conditions  of  the 
social  organization  in  Athens  and  in  Rome  did 

221 


THE  MODERNITY  OF  MOLIERE 

not  tempt  them — indeed,  did  not  permit  them 
— to  achieve  a  large  and  liberal  treatment  of 
human  nature.  Shakspere,  as  it  happened, 
never  undertook  the  comedy  of  manners  which 
is  also  a  comedy  of  character,  perhaps  because 
his  social  background  did  not  supply  the  mate- 
rial for  this  special  type  of  comedy.  The  Lon- 
don of  the  Virgin  Queen  lacked  the  urbanity  of 
the  Paris  of  the  Grand  Monarch.  Elizabethan 
society  was  boisterous  in  speech  and  violent  in 
temper;  and  therefore  no  one  of  Shakspere's 
ever  delightful  comedies,  sometimes  delicately 
romantic  and  sometimes  robustly  farcical,  is  a 
picture  of  the  life  of  his  own  time  and  of  his 
own  country.  Moliere  in  four  or  six  of  his 
amplest  and  deepest  comedies  brings  before  us 
his  own  contemporaries  as  he  had  observed 
them  in  the  city  of  his  birth. 

It  was  these  contemporaries  that  Moliere  had 
to  please,  if  he  was  to  keep  his  theater  open;  and 
this  is  what  every  great  dramatist  has  had  to 
do,  Sophocles  no  less  than  Shakspere.  We  can 
see  that  Moliere  took  account  of  what  was 
wanted  by  the  Parisians  of  the  second  half  of 
the  seventeenth  century,  by  the  young  King,  by 
the  burghers,  and  by  the  populace  also.  He 
gave  them  what  they  expected  from  him,  and 
also  more  than  they  expected,  sometimes  even 
more  than  they  were  ready  to  receive.  Leading 

222 


THE  MODERNITY  OF  MOLIERE 

his  audiences  upward,  coaxing  them  along,  skil- 
fully stimulating  their  desires,  he  was  able  at 
last  to  rise  to  a  level  to  which  no  earlier  comic 
dramatist  had  aspired. 

Great  dramatists  have  always  been  popular 
in  their  own  day.  True  it  is  that  they  may  not 
have  been  adequately  appreciated  while  they 
were  alive,  but  they  were  successful,  none  the 
less.  I  doubt  whether  even  Ben  Jonson  with 
all  his  friendship  for  Shakspere  was  really  aware 
of  his  friend's  true  greatness;  and  I  fear  that  of 
all  Moliere's  associates  only  Boileau  and  La 
Fontaine  were  keen-eyed  enough  to  measure  his 
superiority.  But  there  is  no  denying  that  Shak- 
spere and  Moliere  were  popular  favorites  and 
that  the  playgoers  flocked  gladly  to  see  their 
plays  performed. 

This  immediate  popularity  of  theirs  was  due 
in  a  measure  to  their  skill  in  hitting  the  taste 
and  in  satisfying  the  likings  of  their  contempo- 
raries,— altho  of  course,  their  permanent  fame 
could  be  assured  only  by  their  major  merits,  by 
their  power  of  creating  characters,  which  are 
eternally  attractive  because  they  are  eternally 
veracious. 

Moliere  did  not  hesitate  to  amuse  his  audi- 
ences with  satire  of  passing  fads  and  follies,  with 
things  strictly  contemporary,  with  things  abso- 
lutely up-to-date.  Now,  it  is  the  disadvantage 
223 


THE  MODERNITY  OF  MOLIERE 

of  the  contemporary  that  it  is  four  parts  tempo- 
rary; as  it  is  the  disadvantage  of  the  up-to-date 
that  it  is  swiftly  out-of-date.  It  is  a  striking 
testimony  to  Moliere's  genius  that  his  satire  of 
the  whims  and  oddities  of  his  own  period  has  its 
lesson  for  us  in  another  century  and  in  another 
country.  What  was  fleeting  and  momentary  is 
only  on  the  surface,  and  beneath  it  we  can  dis- 
cover a  veracity  as  abiding  as  human  folly  is 
perennial.  The  fashion  has  altered  and  not  a 
little,  but  the  stuff  is  the  same,  since  it  is  woven 
from  the  unfailing  absurdity  of  human  nature. 
The  affectations  that  Moliere  held  up  to  scorn 
in  the  'Precieuses  Ridicules'  in  France  are  not 
unlike  those  which  we  laugh  at  today  in  Amer- 
ica,—in  the  "  Culture  Club  of  Keokuk,  la.," 
for  example,  and  in  other  clubs,  not  so  far  from 
Manhattan  Island.  The  Learned  Ladies,  the 
'Femmes  Savantes'  of  Manhattan  Island  are  not 
now  cultivating  the  garden  of  Greek  roots;  they 
are  digging  up  the  roots  of  society;  they  are 
parlor-anarchists;  they  are  Little  Groups  of  Seri- 
ous Thinkers,  who  pride  themselves  on  being 
open-minded,  not  having  discovered  the  incon- 
venience of  a  mind  open  at  both  ends.  The 
Imaginary  Invalid  today  is  a  morbid  student  of 
psycho-analysis  making  a  collection  of  his  own 
Freudulent  complexes.  And  Tartuffe?  Well, 
our  Tartuffes  do  not  masquerade  as  religious 
224 


THE  MODERNITY  OF  MOLIERE 

bigots,  rather  are  they  moral  reformers,  "damn- 
ing the  sins  they  have  no  mind  to,"  reformers 
for  revenue  only,  as  dangerous  to  the  public 
welfare  today  as  was  Tar  tuff  e  in  his  time. 
What  is  Scapin  but  a  proof-before-letters  of  the 
chief  figure  in  our  crook-plays  ?  What  is  the  un- 
scrupulous valet  who  befools  Monsieur  de  Pour- 
ceaugnac  but  the  first  edition  of  our  confidence- 
operator,  our  bunco-steerer  ? — if  I  may  venture 
to  employ  these  unsavory  neologisms  in  the 
presence  of  two  members  of  the  French  Acad- 
emy. My  sole  excuse  for  this  lapse  from  lin- 
guistic propriety  is  my  wish  to  emphasize  the 
fact  that  Moliere  is  our  contemporary,  after  all, 
— that  he  is  quite  up-to-date  two  centuries  and 
a  half  since  he  died. 

Moliere  is  important  to  us  here  in  America, 
not  only  because  of  the  pleasure  and  the  profit 
we  can  find  in  the  performance  of  his  plays  and 
in  their  perusal  if  we  are  denied  the  benefit  of 
seeing  them  acted,  he  is  important  to  us  not 
only  because  he  is  the  master  of  modern  com- 
edy, but  also  because  he  is  the  chief  figure  in 
French  literature,  because  he  united  in  himself 
certain  of  the  chief  characteristics  of  that  litera- 
ture, its  dramatic  ingenuity  and  its  abhorrence 
of  affectation,  its  relish  for  the  concrete  and  its 
social  instinct.  It  is  good  for  us  to  see  these 
characteristics  in  action;  and  the  lesson  Moliere 
225 


THE  MODERNITY  OF  MOLIERE 

has  for  us  transcends  the  limitations  of  litera- 
ture. While  there  may  be  a  more  soaring 
imagination,  a  more  easily  released  energy,  in 
English  literature  in  both  its  branches,  British 
and  American,  than  there  is  in  French  literature, 
there  is  a  far  less  persistent  application  of  the 
reasoning  powers,  a  less  free  play  of  the  intelli- 
gence, less  sobriety  and  less  sanity,  more  exu- 
berance and  more  extravagance.  The  French 
inherited  from  the  classics  a  sense  of  form,  a 
desire  for  unity  of  tone,  for  harmony  of  color, 
for  logic  in  structure  and  for  lucidity  in  style. 
If  Carlyle  and  Ruskin  and  Whitman  had  sat  at 
the  feet  of  the  masters  of  French  literature,  they 
would  have  been  less  impatient  of  authority,  less 
flagrantly  individualistic,  less  rhetorically  riot- 
ous. Though  they  might  have  lost  a  little  they 
would  have  gained  much.  Nisard  knew  his 
countrymen  when  he  asserted  that  in  France 
"reason,  which  is  the  common  bond  of  all  men, 
is  more  highly  esteemed  than  imagination,  which 
disperses  them  and  isolates  them." 

We  have  gathered  here  today  to  listen  to  the 
addresses  of  our  two  guests  from  across  the  sea 
and  to  pay  tribute  to  a  great  Frenchman;  and 
we  have  also  a  larger  purpose — to  testify  to  our 
appreciation  of  French  literature  as  a  whole 
and  to  our  admiration  and  affection  for  the 
French  people.  Here  in  America  we  are  not 
226 


THE  MODERNITY  OF  MOLIERE 

likely  ever  to  forget  the  indebtedness  we  are 
under  to  France  for  coming  to  our  rescue  in  our 
hour  of  need  nearly  a  century  and  a  half  ago; 
that  debt  is  a  debt  of  honor  and  it  is  not  out- 
lawed by  time.  Nor  can  we  fail  to  remember 
that  it  was  a  Frenchman,  Rousseau,  who  in- 
spired the  superb  eloquence  of  the  Declaration 
of  Independence  and  that  it  was  another 
Frenchman,  Montesquieu,  whose  political  sagac- 
ity guided  the  makers  of  our  Constitution.  The 
tie  that  binds  us  to  France  is  twisted  of  many 
strands  of  many  colors,  but  we  have  reason  to 
believe  that  it  is  strong  enough  to  withstand 
any  strain  that  may  be  put  upon  it. 

(1922.) 


227 


XIV 

THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN  OF 
LETTERS 


XIV 

THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN  OF 
LETTERS 


THE  more  closely  we  scrutinize  Theodore 
Roosevelt's  life  and  the  more  carefully  we 
consider  his  many  ventures  in  many  totally  dif- 
ferent fields  of  human  activity,  the  less  likely 
we  are  to  challenge  the  assertion  that  his  was 
the  most  interesting  career  ever  vouchsafed  to 
any  American, — more  interesting  even  than  Ben- 
jamin Franklin's,  fuller,  richer  and  more  varied. 
Like  Franklin,  Roosevelt  enjoyed  life  intensely. 
He  was  frank  in  declaring  that  he  had  been 
happy  beyond  the  common  lot  of  man;  and  we 
cannot  doubt  that  Franklin  had  the  same  feel- 
ing. The  most  obvious  cause  of  the  happiness 
and  of  the  interest  of  their  contrasting  careers,  is 
that  they  had  each  of  them  an  incessant  and 
insatiable  curiosity,  which  kept  forcing  them  to 
push  their  inquiries  into  a  variety  of  subjects 
wholly  unrelated  one  to  another.  The  'Many- 

231 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF  LETTERS 

sided  Franklin '  was  the  title  which  Paul  Leicester 
Ford  gave  to  his  biography;  and  Roosevelt  was 
even  more  polygonal. 

Like  Franklin  again,  Roosevelt  will  hold  a 
secure  place  among  our  statesmen,  our  men  of 
science  and  our  men  of  letters,  demanding  due 
appraisal  by  experts  in  statecraft,  in  natural 
history  and  in  literature.  But  they  differ  in 
this,  that  Roosevelt  was  an  author  by  profession, 
and  Franklin  was  an  author  by  accident.  Roose- 
velt had  looked  forward  to  literature  as  a  call- 
ing, whereas  Franklin  produced  literature  only 
as  a  by-product.  Excepting  "Poor  Richard's 
Almanack"  Franklin  never  composed  anything 
in  the  hope  or  desire  for  fame  or  for  money,  or 
even  in  response  to  a  need  for  self-expression.  He 
never  published  a  book;  and  if  he  could  return  to 
earth  he  would  indubitably  be  surprised  to  dis- 
cover that  he  held  an  important  place  in  the 
histories  of  American  literature,  Roosevelt  was 
as  distinctly  a  man  of  letters  as  he  was  a  man  of 
action.  He  made  himself  known  to  the  public, 
first  of  all,  as  the  historian  of  the  American 
navy  in  the  War  of  1812;  he  followed  this  up 
with  the  four  strenuously  documented  volumes 
of  his  'Winning  of  the  West';  and  amid  all  the 
multiplied  activities  of  his  later  years  he  made 
leisure  for  the  appreciation  of  one  or  another  of 
the  books  he  had  found  to  his  taste. 
232 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF   LETTERS 
II 

IT  must  be  admitted  that  in  the  decade  which 
elapsed  after  he  left  the  White  House  his  intense 
interest  in  public  affairs  led  him  to  devote  a 
large  part  of  his  energy  to  the  consideration  of 
the  pressing  problems  of  the  hour,  to  topics  of 
immediate  importance,  to  themes  of  only  an 
ephemeral  value,  sufficient  unto  the  day.  In 
three  or  four  different  periodicals  he  served  as 
" contributing  editor";  in  other  words,  he  was 
a  writer  of  signed  editorials,  in  which  he  was 
always  free  to  express  his  own  views  frankly  and 
fully  without  undue  regard  for  that  mysteiious 
entity,  the  "policy  of  the  paper."  These  con- 
temporary contributions  to  dailies  and  weeklies 
and  monthlies  are  journalism  rather  than  lit- 
erature; and  the  more  completely  they  fulfill 
the  purpose  of  the  moment  the  less  do  they  de- 
mand preservation;  now  and  again  they  have 
the  over-emphatic  repetitions  which  are  more 
or  less  justified  by  the  conditions  of  journalism. 
But  in  these  same  ten  years  Roosevelt  wrote 
also  his  two  books  of  travel  in  Africa  and  in 
South  America,  as  vivacious  as  they  are  consci- 
entious, his  alluring  and  self-revelatory  auto- 
biography, his  two  volumes  of  essays  and 
addresses,  'History  as  Literature'  and  'A  Book- 
lover's  Holidays  in  the  Open/  both  of  them 
pungent  with  his  individuality. 

233 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

It  is  not  always — in  fact  it  is  not  often — that 
the  accomplished  man  of  letters  has  the  essen- 
tial equipment  of  the  journalist;  he  is  likely  to 
be  more  or  less  "academic"  and  to  lack  the  sim- 
plicity, the  singleness  of  purpose,  the  directness 
of  statement  demanded  in  the  discussion  of  the 
events  of  the  moment.  The  editorial  stands  in 
the  same  relation  to  literature  that  the  stump- 
speech  does  to  the  stately  oration.  The  edi- 
torial, like  the  stump-speech,  aims  at  immediate 
effect;  and  it  is  privileged  to  be  more  emphatic 
than  might  be  becoming  in  a  more  permanent 
effort.  It  was  perhaps  Roosevelt's  wide  experi- 
ence in  addressing  the  public  from  the  platform 
which  made  it  easier  for  him  to  qualify  as  a  con- 
tributing editor  and  to  master  the  method  of  the 
newspaper. 

In  his  state-papers  and  in  his  messages  he  had 
already  proved  that  he  had  the  gift  of  the  winged 
phrase,  keenly  pointed  and  barbed  to  flesh  itself 
in  the  memory.  He  had  preached  the  doctrine 
of  the  Strenuous  Life  and  he  had  expounded  the 
policy  of  the  Square  Deal.  He  had  denounced 
some  men  as  Undesirable  Citizens  and  others  as 
Malefactors  of  Large  Wealth.  And  when  he 
took  up  the  task  of  journalism  he  was  happily 
inspired  to  the  minting  of  other  memorable 
phrases.  There  was,  for  example,  an  unforget- 
table felicity  in  his  characterization  of  the 

234 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF   LETTERS 

Weasel  Words  that  sometimes  suck  the  life  out 
of  a  phrase,  seemingly  strong  and  bold.  Never 
did  he  use  smooth  and  sleek  rhetoric  to  disguise 
vagueness  of  thought.  In  the  periodical  as  on 
the  platform  he  spoke  out  of  the  fulness  of  his 
heart,  after  his  mind  had  clarified  his  emotion 
so  that  it  poured  forth  with  crystalline  lucidity. 

There  was  no  mistaking  the  full  intent  of  his 
own  words.  He  knew  what  he  meant  to  say, 
and  he  knew  how  to  say  it  with  simple  sincerity 
and  with  vigorous  vivacity.  His  straightfor- 
wardness prevented  his  ever  employing  phrases 
that  faced  both  ways  and  that  provided  rat- 
holes  from  which  he  might  crawl  out.  His  style 
was  tinglingly  alive;  it  was  masculine  and  vascu- 
lar; and  it  was  always  the  style  of  a  gentleman 
and  a  scholar.  He  could  puncture  with  a  rapier 
and  he  could  smash  with  a  sledge-hammer;  and 
if  he  used  the  latter  more  often  than  the  former 
it  was  because  of  his  consuming  hatred  of  things 
"unmanly,  ignominious,  infamous." 

Journalism  was  young,  indeed,  one  might  say 
that  it  was  still  waiting  to  be  born,  when  Frank- 
lin put  forth  his  pamphlets  appealing  to  the 
scattered  colonies  to  get  together  and  to  make 
common  cause  against  the  French  who  had  let 
loose  the  Indians  to  harry  our  borders.  Frank- 
lin was  cannily  persuasive,  making  use  of  no 
drum-like  words,  empty,  loud-sounding  and 

235 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF   LETTERS 

monotonous.  But  there  burnt  in  his  pages  the 
same  pure  fire  of  patriotism  that  lighted  Roose- 
velt's more  impassioned  exhortations  for  us  to 
arouse  ourselves  from  lethargy,  that  we  might 
do  our  full  duty  in  the  war  which  saved  civiliza- 
tion from  the  barbarian.  Where  Franklin  ad- 
dressed himself  to  common  sense,  Roosevelt 
called  upon  the  imagination.  Perhaps  Franklin, 
as  is  the  tendency  of  a  practical  man,  a  little 
distrusted  the  imagination;  but  Roosevelt,  as 
practical  as  Franklin,  had  imagination  himself, 
and  he  knew  that  the  American  people  also 
had  it. 

It  is  by  imagination,  by  the  vision  and  the 
faculty  divine,  that  now  and  again  an  occasional 
address,  like  Lincoln's  at  Gettysburg,  or  a  con- 
tributed editorial,  like  Roosevelt's  on  the  '  Great 
Adventure,'  transcends  its  immediate  and  tem- 
porary purpose,  and  is  lifted  aloft  up  to  the 
serener  heights  of  pure  literature.  It  is  not 
without  intention  that  the  'Great  Adventure' 
has  been  set  by  the  side  of  the  Gettysburg  ad- 
dress; they  are  akin,  and  there  is  in  Roosevelt's 
paragraphs  not  a  little  of  the  poetic  elevation 
and  of  the  exalted  dignity  of  phrase  which  com- 
bine to  make  the  address  a  masterpiece  of  Eng- 
lish prose.  Consider  the  opening  words  of  the 
'Great  Adventure'  and  take  note  of  the  con- 
cision, like  that  of  a  Greek  inscription: 
236 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF  LETTERS 

Only  those  are  fit  to  live  who  do  not  fear  to  die,  and 
none  are  fit  to  die  who  have  shrunk  from  the  joy  of 
life  and  the  duty  of  life.  Both  life  and  death  are  parts 
of  the  same  Great  Adventure.  Never  yet  was  worthy 
adventure  worthily  carried  through  by  the  man  who 
put  his  personal  safety  first.  Never  yet  was  a  country 
worth  living  in  unless  its  sons  and  daughters  were  of 
that  stern  stuff  which  bade  them  die  for  it  at  need; 
and  never  yet  was  a  country  worth  dying  for  unless 
its  sons  and  daughters  thought  of  life  as  something  not 
concerned  only  with  the  selfish  evanescence  of  the  in- 
dividual, but  as  a  link  in  the  great  chain  of  creation 
and  causation,  so  that  each  person  is  seen  in  his  true 
relations  as  an  essential  part  of  the  whole,  whose  life 
must  be  made  to  serve  the  larger  and  continuing  life 
of  the  whole. 

Consider  also  these  words  a  little  later  in  the 
same  article: 

If  the  only  son  who  is  killed  at  the  front  has  no 
brother  because  his  parents  coldly  dreaded  to  play 
their  part  in  the  Great  Adventure  of  Life,  then  our 
sorrow  is  not  for  them,  but  solely  for  the  son  who  him- 
self dared  the  Great  Adventure  of  Death.  If,  however, 
he  is  the  only  son  because  the  Unseen  Powers  denied 
others  to  the  love  of  his  father  and  mother,  then  we 
mourn  doubly  with  them,  because  their  darling  went 
up  to  the  sword  of  Azrael,  because  he  drank  the  dark 
drink  proffered  by  the  Death  Angel. 


237 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF  LETTERS 
III 

ROOSEVELT'S  style  is  firm  and  forthright;  and 
its  excellence  is  due  to  his  having  learnt  the  les- 
son of  the  masters  of  English.  He  wrote  well  be- 
cause he  had  read  widely  and  deeply, — because 
he  had  absorbed  good  literature  for  the  sheer 
delight  he  took  in  it.  Consciously  or  uncon- 
sciously he  enriched  his  vocabulary,  accumulat- 
ing a  store  of  strong  words  which  he  made  flexi- 
ble, bending  them  to  do  his  bidding.  But  he 
was  never  bookish  in  his  diction;  he  never  went 
in  quest  of  recondite  vocables,  partly  because 
his  taste  was  refined  but  chiefly  because  he  was 
ever  seeking  to  be  "understanded  of  the  peo- 
ple." Like  Lord  Morley,  he  had  little  of  the 
verbal  curiosity  contemned  by  Milton  as  "toil- 
some vanity";  and  he  was  ready  with  Montaigne 
to  laugh  "at  fools  who  will  go  a  quarter  of  a 
league  to  run  after  a  fine  word." 

To  him  life  was  more  important  than  litera- 
ture, and  what  he  was  forever  seeking  to  put 
into  his  literature  was  life  itself.  He  was  a  na- 
ture-lover, but  what  he  loved  best  was  human 
nature.  Yet  his  relish  for  life  was  scarcely 
keener  than  his  relish  for  literature.  We  may 
think  of  him  as  preeminently  an  outdoors  man, 
and  such  he  was,  of  course;  but  he  was  also  an 
indoors  man,  a  denizen  of  the  library  as  he  was 

238 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN  OF   LETTERS 

an  explorer  of  the  forest.  Indoors  and  out  he 
was  forever  reading;  and  he  could  not  venture 
into  the  wilds  of  Africa  in  search  of  big  game 
without  taking  along  with  him  the  volumes  of 
the  Pigskin  Library,  which  testified  at  once  to 
the  persistence  and  to  the  diversity  of  his  tastes 
as  a  reader. 

He  devoured  books  voraciously,  all  sorts  of 
books,  old  and  new,  established  classics,  and 
evanescent  "best  sellers,"  history  and  fiction, 
poetry  and  criticism,  travels  on  land  and  voy- 
ages by  sea.  To  use  an  apt  phrase  of  Dr. 
Holmes,  he  was  at  home  with  books  "as  a 
stable  boy  is  with  horses."  He  might  have 
echoed  Lowell's  declaration  that  he  was  a  book- 
man. The  title  of  one  of  his  later  collections  of 
essays  is  revelatory  of  his  attitude  toward  him- 
self,— 'A  Booklover's  Holidays  in  the  Open/  for 
even  when  he  went  into  the  open  he  wanted  to 
have  a  book  within  reach.  Of  course,  he  en- 
joyed certain  books,  and  certain  kinds  of  books 
better  than  others.  Of  all  Shakspere's  tragedies 
he  best  liked  the  martial  '  Macbeth/  preferring 
it  to  the  more  introspective  ' Hamlet.'  He  was 
not  unlike  the  lad  who  was  laid  up  and  whose 
mother  proposed  to  read  the  Bible  to  him, 
whereupon  he  asked  her  to  pick  out  "the  fight- 
ingest  parts."  He  had  a  special  regard  for  the 
masculine  writers,  for  Malory,  more  particu- 

239 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF  LETTERS 

larly,  holding  the  'Morte  d 'Arthur'  to  be  a  bet- 
ter piece  of  work  than  the  more  delicately  deco- 
rated i  Idylls  of  the  King '  which  Tennyson  made 
out  of  it.  In  fact,  Roosevelt  once  went  so  far 
as  to  dismiss  Tennyson's  elaborate  transposi- 
tions as  "tales  of  blameless  curates,  clad  in  tin- 
mail." 

He  enjoyed  writing  as  much  as  he  did  read- 
ing, and  as  a  result  his  works  go  far  to  fill  a  five- 
foot  shelf  of  their  own.  When  the  man  of  ac- 
tion that  he  was  had  been  out  in  search  of  new 
experiences  and  in  the  hunt  for  new  knowledge, 
the  man  of  letters  that  he  was  also,  impelled 
him  to  lose  no  time  in  setting  down  the  story  of 
his  wanderings  that  others  might  share  in  the 
pleasure  of  his  adventure  without  undergoing 
its  perils.  Being  a  normal  human  being  he 
liked  to  celebrate  himself  and  to  be  his  own 
Boswell;  but  he  was  never  vain  or  conceited  in 
his  record  of  his  own  sayings  and  doings.  He 
had  the  saving  sense  of  humor,  delighting  in 
nothing  more  than  to  tell  a  tale  against  him- 
self. He  was  not  self-conscious  nor  thin-skinned ; 
and  he  laughed  as  heartily  as  anyone  when  Mr. 
Dooley  pretended  to  mistake  the  title  of  his 
account  of  the  work  of  the  Rough  Riders,  call- 
ing it  'Alone  in  Cubia.'  Perhaps  it  was  be- 
cause he  was  so  abundantly  gifted  with  the 
sense  of  humor  that  he  had  a  shrewd  insight 
240 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF  LETTERS 

into  character  and  that  he  could  depict  it  inci- 
sively by  the  aid  of  a  single  significant  anecdote. 
In  sketching  the  many  strange  creatures  with 
whom  he  was  associated  in  the  Far  West,  in 
South  America  and  in  Africa,  he  showed  that 
he  had  the  kodak  eye  of  the  born  reporter. 

So  it  is  that  he  gave  us  the  two  delightful  vol- 
umes for  which  he  drew  upon  his  experiences  as 
a  rancher  in  the  West,  the  stirring  book  devoted 
to  the  deeds  of  his  dearly  beloved  Rough  Rid- 
ers ("my  regiment"),  and  the  solid  tomes  in 
which  he  set  down  the  story  of  his  trips  as  a 
faunal  naturalist  in  Africa  and  in  South  America. 
They  are  all  books  pulsing  with  life,  vibrating 
with  vitality,  and  they  are  all  books  unfailingly 
interesting  to  the  reader  because  whatever  is 
narrated  in  them  has  been  unfailingly  interest- 
ing to  the  writer.  Walter  Bagehot  once  sug- 
gested that  the  reason  why  there  are  so  few 
really  good  books  out  of  all  the  immense  multi- 
tude which  pour  forth  from  the  press,  is  that  the 
men  who  have  seen  things  and  done  things  can- 
not write,  whereas  the  men  who  can  write  have 
not  done  anything  or  seen  anything.  Roose- 
velt's adventure  books  are  really  good,  because, 
after  having  seen  many  things  and  done  many 
things,  he  could  write  about  them  so  vividly  and 
so  sharply  as  to  make  his  readers  see  them. 

Perhaps  the  ' Autobiography'  ought  to  be 
241 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

classed  with  the  earlier  adventure  books,  since 
they  also  were  autobiographic.  It  is  a  candid 
book;  it  puts  before  us  the  man  himself  as  re- 
flected in  his  own  mirror;  but  it  is  not  complete, 
since  it  was  composed,  not  in  the  retrospective 
serenity  of  old  age,  but  while  the  autobiog- 
rapher  was  in  the  thick  of  the  fight,  com- 
pelled to  silence  about  many  of  the  events  of 
his  career  which  we  should  like  to  see  eluci- 
dated. It  was  published  serially  month  by 
month;  and,  perhaps  because  of  the  pressure 
under  which  it  was  undertaken,  it  seems  to  have 
a  vague  air  of  improvisation,  as  tho  it  had 
not  been  as  solidly  thought  out  and  as  cau- 
tiously written  out  as  one  or  another  of  the 
earlier  books,  the  '  Hunting  Trips  of  a  Ranch- 
man,' for  example,  or  the  'Rough  Riders.'  But 
it  abides  as  a  human  document;  and  it  explains 
why  the  autobiographer's  buoyant  personality 
appealed  so  intimately  to  the  American  people. 

IV 

'A  BOOKLOVER'S  HOLIDAYS  IN  THE  OPEN' 
contains  two  characteristic  essays,  both  of  them 
delightful  in  their  zest  and  in  their  individuality. 
One  is  on  'Books  for  Holidays  in  the  Open'  and 
the  other  is  about  the  author's  'Wild  Hunting 
Companions,'  a  searching  and  sympathetic  ap- 
242 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF   LETTERS 

preciation  of  the  human  types  developed  by  the 
wild  life  of  the  lessening  wild  places  still  unin- 
vaded  by  advancing  civilization.  In  'History  as 
Literature  and  Other  Essays/  there  are  other 
papers  as  characteristic  and  as  attractive.  Three 
of  them  are  the  addresses  which  he  delivered  (on 
his  triumphant  return  from  his  African  journeys) 
at  the  Universities  of  Oxford  and  Berlin  and 
at  the  Sorbonne  in  Paris.  They  represent  the 
high-water  mark  of  his  work  as  a  construc- 
tive thinker.  They  are  the  lofty  and  dignified 
utterances  of  a  statesman  who  was  a  practical 
politician  of  immense  experience  in  the  conduct 
of  public  affairs,  and  who  was  also  a  man  of 
letters  ambitious  to  present  worthily  the  re- 
sults of  his  experience  and  of  his  meditation. 
These  disquisitions  on  themes  seemingly  so  re- 
mote from  his  special  fields  of  activity  as  the 
biological  analogies  of  history,  for  example,  have 
been  called  daring;  and  in  fact  they  are  dar- 
ing. But  they  justify  themselves,  since  they 
disclose  Roosevelt's  possession  of  the  assimilated 
information  and  the  interpreting  imagination 
which  could  survey  the  whole  field  of  history, 
past  and  present,  using  the  present  to  illuminate 
the  past  and  the  past  as  a  beacon  to  the  present, 
and  calling  upon  natural  history  to  shed  light 
upon  the  evolution  of  human  history. 
These  addresses  are  representative  of  Roose- 

243 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

velt  when  he  chose  to  indulge  himself  in  historic 
speculation;  and  in  the  same  volume  there  is  an 
essay,  less  ambitious  but  highly  individual  in 
theme  and  in  treatment,  and  quite  as  character- 
istic as  its  stately  companions.  This  is  the  dis- 
cussion at  once  scholarly  and  playful  of  'Dante 
in  the  Bowery7 — a  paper  which  could  have  been 
written  only  by  a  lover  of  lofty  poetry  who  had 
been  a  practical  politician  in  New  York.  To 
Roosevelt  Dante's  mighty  vision  is  not  a  frigid 
classic  demanding  formal  lip-service  but  a  living 
poem  with  a  voice  as  warm  as  if  it  had  been 
bora  only  yesterday.  To  him  the  figures  who 
pass  along  Dante's  pages  are  not  graven  images, 
tagged  with  explanatory  foot-notes;  they  are 
human  beings  like  unto  us,  the  men  of  today 
and  of  New  York. 

Thus  it  is  that  Roosevelt  is  led  to  dwell  on 
the  unaffectedness  with  which  Dante  dares  to 
be  of  his  own  town  and  of  his  own  time,  and  the 
simplicity  with  which  Dante,  wishing  to  assail 
those  guilty  of  crimes  of  violence,  mentions  in 
one  stanza  Attila  and  in  the  next  two  local 
highwaymen  "by  no  means  as  important  as 
Jesse  James  and  Billy  the  Kid,"  less  formidable 
as  fighting  men  and  with  adventures  less  star- 
tling and  less  varied.  Roosevelt  called  attention 
to  the  fact  that  "of  all  the  poets  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  Walt  Whitman  was  the  only 
244 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF   LETTERS 

one  who  dared  to  use  the  Bowery, — that  is,  use 
anything  that  was  striking  and  vividly  typical 
of  the  humanity  around  him — as  Dante  used  the 
ordinary  humanity  of  his  day;  and  even  Whit- 
man was  not  quite  natural  in  doing  so,  for  he 
always  felt  that  he  was  defying  conventions  and 
prejudices  of  his  neighbors;  and  his  self-con- 
sciousness made  him  a  little  defiant."  Roosevelt 
asked  why  it  is  that  to  us  moderns  in  the 
twentieth  century  it  should  seem  improper,  and 
even  ludicrous,  to  illustrate  human  nature  by 
examples  chosen  alike  from  Castle  Garden  and 
the  Piraeus,  "from  Tammany  and  the  Roman 
mob  organized  by  the  foes  or  friends  of  Caesar. 
To  Dante  such  feeling  itself  would  have  been 
inexplicable." 


VARIED  and  brilliant  as  were  Roosevelt's  con- 
tributions to  other  departments  of  literature,  it 
is  more  than  probable  that  his  ultimate  reputa- 
tion as  a  man  of  letters  will  most  securely  rest 
upon  his  stern  labors  as  a  historian, — not  on  the 
brisk  and  lively  little  book  on  New  York  which 
he  contributed  to  Freeman's  ' Historic  Towns' 
series,  not  on  the  biographies  of  Ben  ton  and 
Gouverneur  Morris  which  he  wrote  for  the 
1  American  Statesmen'  series,  not  on  the  shrewd 
and  sympathetic  life  of  Cromwell,  not  on  the 

245 


THEODORE   ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF   LETTERS 

stirring  and  picturesque  'Hero  Tales  of  Ameri- 
can History/  which  he  prepared  in  collaboration 
with  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  but  on  the  four  stately 
volumes  of  his  most  energetic  and  ambitious 
undertaking,  the  story  of  the  'Winning  of  the 
West/  which  he  began  early  in  his  manhood 
and  which  he  was  always  hoping  to  carry  further. 
Macaulay  once  praised  the  work  of  one  of  his 
contemporaries  because  it  exhibited  the  most 
valuable  qualities  of  the  historian, — "perspicu- 
ousness,  conciseness,  great  diligence  in  examin- 
ing authorities,  great  judgment  in  weighing  tes- 
timony, and  great  impartiality  in  estimating 
characters";  and  no  competent  reader  of  the 
'  Winning  of  the  West'  could  fail  to  find  all  these 
qualities  in  its  pages.  A  later  historian,  Pro- 
fessor Morse  Stephens,  set  up  four  tests  for  the 
valuation  of  historical  writing;  first,  the  modern 
historian  must  have  "  conscientiously  mastered 
all  the  documents  relating  to  his  period  at  first 
hand";  secondly,  he  must  appreciate  all  accessi- 
ble primary  material  "with  careful  weighing  of 
evidence  and  trained  faculty  of  judgment"; 
thirdly,  he  must  possess  absolute  impartiality, 
"in  intention  as  well  as  in  act ";  and  fourthly,  he 
must  also  possess  "the  one  necessary  feature  of 
literary  style"  in  a  history,  "clearness  of  state- 
ment." And  the  'Winning  of  the  West'  can 
withstand  the  application  of  all  four  of  these 
246 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN  OF   LETTERS 

tests.  In  other  words,  it  is  scientific  in  the  col- 
lection and  comparison  and  analysis  of  the  ac- 
cessible facts,  and  it  is  artistic  in  its  presenta- 
tion to  the  reader  of  the  results  of  the  writer's 
indefatigable  research. 

As  the  ' Winning  of  the  West'  was  written  by 
Roosevelt  it  could  not  help  being  readable. 
Every  chapter  and  every  page  is  alive  and  alert 
with  his  own  forceful  and  enthusiastic  personal- 
ity. This  readability  is  not  attained  by  any 
facile  eloquence  or  any  glitter  of  rhetoric,  altho 
it  has  passages,  and  not  a  few  of  them,  which 
linger  in  the  memory  because  of  their  felicitous 
phrasing.  The  book  is  abidingly  readable  because 
it  is  the  result  of  deliberate  literary  art  employed 
to  present  honestly  the  result  of  honest,  scien- 
tific inquiry.  This  is  his  sterling  virtue  as  a 
historian,  fittingly  acknowledged  by  his  fellow- 
workers  in  this  field  when  they  elected  him  to 
the  presidency  of  the  American  Historical  Asso- 
ciation. 

In  an  evaluation  of  the  final  volumes  of  Park- 
man's  fascinating  record  of  the  fateful  struggle 
between  the  French  and  the  English  for  the 
control  of  North  America,  an  article  written  in 
1892  while  that  great  historian  was  still  living, 
Roosevelt  remarked  that  "modern  historians  al- 
ways lay  great  stress  upon  visiting  the  places 
where  the  events  they  described  occurred";  and 
247 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF  LETTERS 

he  commented  that,  altho  this  is  advisable,  it  is 
far  less  important  than  the  acquisition  of  an 
intimate  acquaintance  "with  the  people  and  the 
life  described."  Then  he  asserted  that  "it  is 
precisely  this  experience  which  Mr.  Parkman 
has  had,  and  which  renders  his  work  so  especially 
valuable.  He  knows  the  Indian  character  and 
the  character  of  the  white  frontiersman,  by  per- 
sonal observation  as  well  as  by  books;  neither 
knowledge  by  itself  being  of  much  value  for  a 
historian.  In  consequence  he  writes  with  a 
clear  and  keen  understanding  of  the  conditions." 
Roosevelt, himself  had  the  clear  and  keen  under- 
standing of  the  conditions  with  which  he  cred- 
ited Parkman,  in  whose  footsteps  he  was  follow- 
ing, since  the  ' Winning  of  the  West'  may  be 
called  a  continuation  of  'France  and  England  in 
North  America/  Like  Parkman,  Roosevelt  was 
a  severely  trained  scientific  investigator,  who 
was  also  a  born  story-teller.  If  the  historian  is 
only  an  investigator,  the  result  is  likely  to  be  a 
justification  of  the  old  jibe  which  defined  history 
as  "an  arid  region  abounding  in  dates";  and  if 
he  is  only  a  story-teller  his  narrative  will  speed- 
ily disintegrate. 

"The  true  historian,"  Roosevelt  asserted  in 

'  History  as  Literature/  his  presidential  address 

to  the  American  Historical  Association,  "will 

bring  the  past  before  our  eyes  as  if  it  were  the 

248 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN  OF  LETTERS 

present.  He  will  make  us  see  as  living  men  the 
hard-faced  archers  of  Agincourt,  and  the  war- 
worn spearmen  who  followed  Alexander  down 
beyond  the  rim  of  the  known  world.  We  shall 
hear  grate  on  the  coast  of  Britain  the  keels  of 
the  Low-Dutch  sea-thieves  whose  children's  chil- 
dren were  to  inherit  unknown  continents.  .  .  . 
We  shall  see  conquerors  riding  forward  to  victo- 
ries that  have  changed  the  course  of  time.  .  .  . 
We  shall  see  the  terrible  horsemen  of  Timur  the 
Lame  ride  over  the  roof  of  the  world;  we  shall 
hear  the  drums  beat  as  the  armies  of  Gustavus 
and  Frederick  and  Napoleon  drive  forward  to 
victory.  .  .  .  We  shall  see  the  glory  of  tri- 
umphant violence  and  the  revel  of  those  who 
do  wrong  in  high  places;  and  the  broken-hearted 
despair  that  lies  beneath  the  glory  and  the 
revel.  We  shall  also  see  the  supreme  righteous- 
ness of  the  wars  for  freedom  and  justice,  and 
know  that  the  men  who  fell  in  those  wars  made 
all  mankind  their  debtors." 

VI 

AT  the  end  of  the  Foreword  to  'A  Book- 
lover's  Holidays, J  there  is  a  noble  passage  which 
calls  for  quotation  here  as  an  example  of  Roose- 
velt's command  of  nervous  English,  measured 
and  cadenced.  It  is  proposed  in  proof  of  the 
249 


THEODORE  ROOSEVELT  AS  A  MAN   OF   LETTERS 

assertion  that  the  joy  of  living  is  his  who  has 
the  heart  to  demand  it: 

The  beauty  and  charm  of  the  wilderness  are  his  for 
the  asking,  for  the  edges  of  the  wilderness  lie  close 
beside  the  beaten  roads  of  present  travel.  He  can 
see  the  red  splendor  of  desert  sunsets,  and  the  un- 
earthly glory  of  the  afterglow  on  the  battlements  of 
desolate  mountains.  In  sapphire  gulfs  of  ocean  he 
can  visit  islets,  above  which  the  wings  of  myriads  of 
sea-fowl  make  a  kind  of  shifting  cuneiform  script  in 
the  air.  He  can  ride  along  the  brink  of  the  stu- 
pendous cliff-walled  canyon,  where  eagles  soar  below 
him,  and  cougars  make  their  lairs  on  the  edges  and 
harry  the  big-horned  sheep.  He  can  journey  through 
the  northern  forests,  the  home  of  the  giant  moose,  the 
forests  of  fragrant  and  murmuring  life  in  summer,  the 
iron-bound  and  melancholy  forests  of  winter. 

Theodore  Roosevelt  had  the  heart  to  demand 
it,  and  the  joy  of  living  was  his. 

(1919.) 


250 


XV 

MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 


XV 

MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 


THERE  can  be  but  very  few  of  the  count- 
less thousands  of  Mark  Twain's  admirers 
whose  admiration  was  born  as  early  as  mine, 
now  more  than  half-a-century  ago,  in  fact  in 
1867,  when  his  first  book,  the  'Jumping  Frog 
and  other  sketches,'  was  published  and  when  a 
copy  came  into  my  possession,  I  being  then  a 
bookish  lad  of  only  fifteen.  For  two  score  years 
I  "read  after  him,"  as  the  phrase  is;  and  so  it  is 
that  I  have  been  able  to  profit  by  what  I  believe 
to  be  an  inestimable  advantage  for  the  proper 
appreciation  of  an  author, — that  of  following  his 
work  from  first  to  last,  growing  up  with  it,  as  it 
ripened  and  varied  and  broadened,  revealing 
more  and  more  richly  the  man  whose  self-ex- 
pression it  was.  It  is  a  far  cry  from  the  '  Jump- 
ing Frog'  to  the  l Mysterious  Stranger';  and  the 
long  road  from  the  bold  humor  of  the  one  to 
the  bitter  satire  of  the  other  had  many  an  un- 
expected turning. 

253 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

Four  years  after  the  'Jumping  Frog'  had  ap- 
peared I  was  elected  to  the  Lotos  Club,  altho  I 
was  then  still  an  undergraduate  at  Columbia; 
and  I  have  a  doubtful  impression  that  in  the 
Lotos  Club,  then  newly  settled  in  its  first  home 
at  Irving  Place,  next  to  the  Academy  of  Music, 
I  saw  Mark  more  than  once,  gazing  at  him, 
with  the  remote  respect  proper  in  a  youth,  who 
had  his  own  vague  literary  aspirations,  for  an 
author  who  had  already  published  the  widely 
popular  '  Innocents  Abroad/  What  I  can  assert 
with  absolute  conviction  is  that  I  did  see  him 
in  1875  at  the  hundredth  performance  of  the 
happy-go-lucky  dramatization  of  his  half  of  the 
'  Gilded  Age/  (in  which  Charles  Dudley  Warner 
had  been  his  collaborator).  John  T.  Raymond, 
a  most  accomplished  comedian,  had  identified 
himself  with  the  optimistic  character  of  Colonel 
Mulberry  Sellers.  At  this  performance  I  not 
only  saw  Mark  but  heard  him  make  a  speech 
when  he  was  called  before  the  curtain.  As  I 
remember  it,  this  was  not  one  of  his  happiest 
addresses,  since  it  consisted  of  little  more  than 
his  recital  of  the  story  of  the  'Celebrated  Mexi- 
can Plug,'  an  unbroken  broncho,  possessing  the 
power  of  speedily  reducing  the  man  who  at- 
tempted to  ride  him  to  a  condition  of  exhausted 
speechlessness.  "And  that,"  Mark  concluded, 
"is  the  condition  in  which  I  find  myself  to- 

254 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

night.  I  stand  before  you  now  quite  speech- 
less!" 

Then  in  1882  Laurence  Hutton  and  Lawrence 
Barrett,  Frank  Millet  and  E.  A.  Abbey,  W.  M. 
Laffan  and  I  organized  an  intermittent  and 
sporadic  dining  club,  which  we  called  The  Kins- 
men, because  we  intended  to  gather  in  the  prac- 
titioners of  the  kindred  arts.  It  had  no  offi- 
cers, no  dues,  and  no  rules,  except  that  an 
invitation  to  one  of  our  meetings  was  to  be  ac- 
cepted as  an  election  to  membership.  I  gave 
the  first  dinner;  and  at  the  second,  given  by 
Hutton  a  full  year  later,  I  was  delighted  to  find 
myself  sitting  by  the  side  of  Mark  Twain.  Then 
began  an  intimacy  which  lasted  until  his  death 
more  than  twenty  years  thereafter.  Three  or 
four  years  later,  when  'Huckleberry  Finn'  was 
issued,  I  had  the  pleasure  of  reviewing  it  in  the 
London  Saturday  Review,  hailing  it  as  one  of 
the  indisputable  masterpieces  of  American  fic- 
tion. This  pleased  Mark;  and  as  he  had  some- 
how discovered  that  I  had  written  the  criticism, 
he  took  occasion  to  thank  me. 

Mark  was  also  one  of  the  earliest  members  of 
the  Authors  Club,  of  which  I  had  been  one  of 
the  founders;  and  I  served  with  him  on  the  ex- 
ecutive committee  of  the  American  Copyright 
League.  It  was  during  our  eight-year  cam- 
paign for  international  copyright  that  my  rela- 

255 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

tions  with  Mark  became  a  little  strained, — altho 
fortunately  only  for  a  brief  period.  Until  the 
passage  of  our  bill  in  1891,  no  foreign  author 
had  any  control  over  the  publication  of  his 
writings  in  the  United  States;  an  American  pub- 
lisher could  reprint  without  payment  anything 
any  British  man  of  letters  wrote;  and  as  a  result 
every  American  man  of  letters  had  to  see  his 
books  sold  in  competition  with  stolen  goods. 
We  all  felt  this  keenly;  but  only  a  few  of  us 
knew  that  there  were  certain  London  publishers 
quite  as  willing  to  reprint  American  books  with- 
out payment  as  certain  New  York  publishers 
were  to  appropriate  British  books  on  the  same 
terms.  While  we  wanted  the  rights  of  the  au- 
thors of  the  United  Kingdom  to  be  protected  in 
the  United  States,  we  also  wanted  the  rights  of 
the  authors  of  the  United  States  to  be  protected 
in  the  United  Kingdom.  In  1889  I  prepared  a 
paper  for  the  New  Princeton  Review,  which  I 
called  ' American  Authors  and  British  Pirates' 
and  in  which  I  collected  examples  of  the  cruel 
treatment  accorded  to  certain  of  our  writers, 
forced  to  behold  their  works  reprinted  in  Eng- 
land without  their  permission  and  often  with  an 
offensive  mutilation  of  the  original  in  the  vain 
effort  to  adjust  it  to  the  supposed  prejudices  of 
British  readers. 

The  facts  I  had  collected  surprized  many  who 
256 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

had  been  ignorant  of  them;  and  the  editor  of 
the  New  Princeton  Review,  Professor  William  M. 
Sloane,  suggested  that  I  might  get  together  ma- 
terial for  a  second  paper.  So  I  wrote  to  half-a- 
dozen  American  authors  who  had  been  mal- 
treated by  British  publishers,  requesting  them 
to  supply  me  with  particulars.  One  of  my  let- 
ters went  to  Mark;  and  a  few  days  later  Pro- 
fessor Sloane  let  me  see  Mark's  reply,  which  he 
had  sent  not  to  me  but  direct  to  the  editor  for 
publication  in  the  New  Princeton.  It  was  a 
vehement  protest  against  my  suggestion  that 
the  British  law  needed  any  alteration;  and 
it  held  me  up  to  scorn  for  making  the  needless 
proposal.  Mark  let  his  pen  run  away  with 
him  and  poured  ridicule  upon  me,  in  a  fashion 
which  was  lacking  in  consideration  for  my 
feelings  even  if  it  was  not  actually  wanting  in 
courtesy.  It  was  a  brilliant  letter,  certain  to 
evoke  abundant  laughter  from  every  reader — 
excepting  only  the  one  to  whom  it  was  ad- 
dressed. It  was  also  an  unanswerable  letter,  in 
so  far  as  its  inimitable  manner  was  concerned; 
and  yet  it  had  to  be  answered  somehow. 

What  had  aroused  the  sudden  wrath  which 
had  blazed  up  in  Mark's  epistolary  excoriation 
was  my  assertion  that  the  British  law  could  be 
improved,  it  being  then  perfectly  satisfactory  to 
Mark  himself.  Now  the  British  law  was  better 

257 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

than  the  American  in  only  one  particular.  No 
British  author  could  get  any  protection  in  the 
United  States,  whereas  the  British  courts  had 
held  that  any  book  first  published  in  Great 
Britain  while  its  author  was  domiciled  in  any 
part  of  the  British  Empire,  was  entitled  to  the 
full  protection  accorded  by  the  statutes  to  a 
book  by  a  British  subject. 

In  accord  with  the  old  rule  of  controversy — 
always  to  answer  earnest  with  jest  and  jest  with 
earnest — I  wrote  a  short  and  simple  reply, 
strictly  legal  in  tone.  I  pointed  out  that  Mark, 
having  permanent  relations  with  a  satisfactory 
publisher  in  London  could  always  run  up  to 
Canada  or  slip  down  to  Bermuda  so  as  to  be 
under  the  British  flag  on  the  day  when  any 
new  book  of  his  was  to  be  issued  in  England. 
Then  I  made  it  plain  that  this  procedure  was 
not  possible  for  a  young  writer  with  his  first 
book,  often  his  best  and  often  made  up  out  of 
contributions  to  periodicals.  There  was  no  fun 
in  my  response  and  it  must  have  seemed  pretty 
pale  in  comparison  with  Mark's  corruscating 
fireworks;  but  I  had  on  my  side  both  the  facts 
and  the  law. 

I  had  cause  to  feel  aggrieved  that  he  had  seen 
fit  to  pillory  me  in  the  market-place;  but  I  was 
unwilling  to  take  offence;  and  I  was  unable  to 
see  any  reason  for  his  resentment  of  my  studi- 

258 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

ously  respectful  retort.  Yet  I  soon  heard  from 
more  than  one  of  our  common  friends  that  Mark 
was  acutely  dissatisfied;  and  when  I  next  met 
him,  he  was  distant  in  his  manner, — and  I  might 
even  describe  it  as  chilly.  Of  course,  I  regretted 
this ;  but  I  could  only  hope  that  his  fundamental 
friendliness  would  warm  him  up  sooner  or  later. 
I  knew  that  Mark  had  a  hair-trigger  temper 
and  that  he  was  swift  to  let  loose  all  the  artil- 
lery of  heaven  to  blow  a  foe  from  off  the  face  of 
the  earth.  I  was  aware  moreover  that  a  pro- 
fessional humorist  is  not  infrequently  a  little  de- 
ficient in  that  element  of  the  sense-of-humor 
which  guards  a  man  against  taking  himself  too 
seriously.  I  had  been  told  also  that  Mark 
genial  as  he  was,  and  long  suffering  as  he  often 
was,  could  be  a  good  hater,  superbly  exaggerat- 
ing the  exuberance  of  his  ill-will.  His  old 
friend,  Twitchell,  once  wrote  him  about  a  piece 
of  bad  luck  which  had  befallen  a  man  who  had 
been  one  of  Mark's  special  antipathies;  and 
Mark  wrote  back: 

I  am  more  than  charmed  to  hear  of  it;  still,  it  doesn't 
do  me  half  the  good  it  would  have  done  if  it  had  come 
sooner.  My  malignity  has  so  worn  out  and  wasted 
away  with  time  and  the  exercise  of  charity  that  even 
his  death  would  not  afford  me  anything  more  than  a 
mere  fleeting  ecstasy,  a  sort  of  momentary,  pleasurable 
titillation,  now — unless  of  course,  it  happened  in  some 

259 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

particularly  radiant  way,  like  burning  or  boiling  or 
something  like  that.  Joys  that  come  to  us  after  the 
capacity  for  enjoyment  is  dead  are  but  an  affront. 


II 

I  DID  not  have  to  wait  very  long  before  our 
friendship  was  renewed,  never  again  to  be  dis- 
turbed. We  spent  part  of  the  summer  of  1890 
in  the  Catskills,  at  Onteora,  the  hill-top  park 
dotted  with  unpretending  cottages  which  housed 
a  colony  of  workers  in  the  several  arts, — Mrs. 
Candace  Wheeler,  Mrs.  Dora  Wheeler  Keith, 
Mrs.  Schuyler  Van  Renssellaer,  Mrs.  Mary 
Mapes  Dodge,  Mrs.  Custer,  Mrs.  Runkle  and 
her  daughter  Bertha,  Carroll  Beckwith,  Laurence 
Hutton,  Heber  Newton  and  Mark  Twain. 
Within  a  week  after  our  arrival  Mark  stepped 
up  on  our  porch,  as  pleasantly  as  if  there  had 
never  been  a  cloud  on  our  friendship.  "I  hear 
you  play  a  French  game  called  piquet,"  he  be- 
gan. "I  wish  you  would  teach  me."  And  we 
taught  him,  altho  it  was  no  easy  task,  since 
he  was  forever  wanting  to  make  over  the  rules 
of  the  game  to  suit  his  whim  of  the  moment, — a 
boyish  trait  which  I  soon  discovered  to  be  en- 
tirely characteristic. 

But  we  were  all  boys  together  that  summer; 
and  we  invented  new  ways  for  discharging  our 
260 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

high  spirits.  On  the  Fourth  of  July  we  had  a 
succession  of  sports,  including  a  race  around  the 
club-house.  Mark  officiated  as  timekeeper,  sup- 
plying a  host  of  fanciful  explanations  why  the 
runners  took  twice  the  time  really  necessary  for 
the  circuit  of  the  building.  He  had  to  admit 
that  the  joke  was  on  him  when  at  last  they  did 
appear — coming  back  on  the  side  from  which 
they  originally  started.  From  the  first  he  felt 
himself  at  ease  with  the  friendly  folk  of  Onteora; 
and  I  think  he  was  appreciative  of  the  high  re- 
gard we  had  for  him.  He  was  a  hard  worker 
at  intervals;  and  he  was  then  worried  by  the 
difficulties  in  which  his  business  as  a  publisher 
was  becoming  more  and  more  deeply  involved. 
But  he  liked  to  play,  especially  with  his  own 
children,  making  them  accept  him  as  of  their 
own  age;  and  he  also  could  play  with  the  grown- 
ups as  if  he  were  a  child. 

One  evening  we  all  gathered  at  Mrs.  Wheeler's 
log-cabin  and  sat  around  a  crackling  wood-fire, 
which  was  the  only  light  in  the  large  room.  We 
swapped  ghost-stories;  and  at  the  end  Mark 
told  us,  as  only  he  could  tell  it,  with  a  marvel- 
lous mastery  of  pause  and  intonation,  the  har- 
rowing tale  of  the  '  Golden  Arm.'  The  curious 
reader  will  find  full  directions  for  the  proper  de- 
livery of  this  blood  curdling  narrative  in  the 
paper  he  called  'How  to  tell  a  Story'; — but  the 
261 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

reader  who  tries  to  follow  the  precepts  there 
set  down  will  need  to  toil  long  before  he  can 
even  approach  the  perfection  of  Mark's  technic 
in  telling  the  tale. 

He  sat  to  Mrs.  Wheeler's  daughter,  Mrs. 
Keith,  for  a  portrait  which  adorns  to  this  day 
the  walls  of  the  Bear  and  Fox  Inn,  companioned 
by  portraits  of  several  of  the  other  men  of  let- 
ters whose  stay  made  that  summer  ever  mem- 
orable in  the  annals  of  Onteora.  He  also  sat  to 
Carroll  Beckwith,  a  native  of  the  straggling  town 
in  which  Mark  had  spent  his  boyhood,  for  a 
portrait  which  is,  I  think,  the  best  that  artist 
ever  painted.  It  represents  Mark  with  a  corn- 
cob pipe  in  his  mouth.  Generally  he  smoked 
cigars  of  a  specially  atrocious  brand,  but  he  kept 
returning  fondly  to  the  corn-cob  of  his  youth. 
At  The  Players,  which  he  joined  about  that 
time,  he  protested,  with  all  the  vehemence  of  his 
resplendent  vocabulary,  against  the  rule  forbid- 
ding pipes  except  in  the  billiard-room,  while 
cigarettes  (which  he  abominated  and  objurgated 
vigorously)  were  permitted  even  in  the  dining 
room.  He  was  an  incessant  smoker,  yet  he  was 
wont  to  say  that  he  never  smoked  to  excess, — 
that  is,  he  never  smoked  two  cigars  at  once  and 
he  never  smoked  when  he  was  asleep.  But 
Howells  has  recorded  that  when  Mark  came  to 
visit  him,  he  used  to  go  into  Mark's  room  at 
262 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

night  to  remove  the  still  lighted  cigar  from  the 
lips  of  his  sleeping  guest. 

As  Onteora  had  seemed  a  perilous  experiment 
to  its  originators  the  Bear  and  Fox  Inn  had 
been  run  up  as  inexpensively  as  might  be;  and 
the  partitions  separating  the  upper  bed-rooms 
were  only  of  burlap.  Mark  had  spent  a  night 
at  the  unpretending  club-house,  when  he  had 
earlier  come  up  to  make  sure  that  the  cottage 
he  had  rented  would  be  comfortable  for  Mrs. 
Clemens;  and  as  a  result  of  this  brief  sojourn  he 
was  moved  to  declare  that  the  walls  of  those 
bed-rooms  were  so  thin  that  he  "could  hear  the 
young  lady  in  the  next  room  change  her  mind." 

That  he  came  up  in  advance  of  the  family 
was  typical  of  the  care  he  was  never  tired  of 
taking  to  assure  his  wife's  well  being.  His  de- 
votion to  her  was  a  matter  of  daily  observation 
to  all  of  us.  He  waited  on  her,  protected  her, 
thought  for  her,  as  tho  nothing  else  mattered; 
and  to  him,  it  did  not.  He  treated  her  as  a 
creature  of  a  finer  clay,  fragile  and  infinitely  pre- 
cious, needing  to  be  guarded  from  careless  con- 
tacts. If  ever  in  this  world  of  mismating  a  per- 
fect marriage  existed,  then  it  was  Mark's.  As 
Howells — who  knew  them  both  better  than  any 
one  else — has  told  us,  Mark's  love  for  his  wife 
"was  a  greater  part  of  him  than  the  love  of 
most  men  for  their  wives;  and  she  merited  all 
263 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

the  worship  he  could  give  her,  all  the  devotion, 
all  the  implicit  obedience  by  her  surpassing  force 
and  beauty  of  character." 

Once  and  once  only  did  Mark  mention  his 
wife  in  print.  This  was  in  a  letter  on  the  bring- 
ing up  of  children,  which  he  had  sent  without 
her  knowledge  to  the  Christian  Union  (now  the 
Outlook),  in  1885,  five  years  before  our  summer 
together  at  Onteora: 

The  mother  of  my  children  adores  them — there  is  no 
milder  term  for  it;  and  they  worship  her;  they  even 
worship  anything  which  the  touch  of  her  hand  has  made 
sacred.  They  know  her  for  the  best  and  truest  friend 
they  ever  had,  or  ever  shall  have;  they  know  her  for 
one  who  never  did  them  a  wrong  and  cannot  do  them 
a  wrong;  who  never  told  them  a  lie  nor  the  shadow  of 
one;  who  never  deceived  them  even  by  an  ambiguous 
gesture;  who  never  gave  them  an  unreasonable  com- 
mand, nor  ever  contented  herself  with  anything  short 
of  a  perfect  obedience;  who  had  always  treated  them 
as  politely  and  as  considerately  as  she  would  the  best 
and  oldest  in  the  land,  and  who  always  required  of 
them  gentle  speech  and  courteous  conduct  toward  all, 
of  whatsoever  degree,  with  whom  they  chanced  to 
come  in  contact;  they  know  her  for  one  whose  promise 
whether  of  reward  or  punishment,  is  gold,  and  always 
worth  its  face,  to  the  uttermost  farthing.  In  a  word, 
they  know  her,  and  I  know  her,  for  the  best  and  dearest 
mother  that  lives — and  by  a  long,  long  way  the  wisest. 


264 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 
III 

IT  was  in  the  course  of  one  of  our  many  con- 
versations at  Onteora  that  Mark  described  to 
me  his  method  of  work  in  writing  'Tom  Sawyer' 
and '  Huckleberry  Finn/  He  declared  that  there 
was  no  episode  in  either  of  these  stories  which 
had  not  actually  happened,  either  to  himself  or 
to  one  or  another  of  the  boys  he  had  known. 
He  began  the  composition  of  'Tom  Sawyer' 
with  certain  of  his  boyish  recollections  in  mind, 
writing  on  and  on  until  he  had  utilized  them  all, 
whereupon  he  put  his  manuscript  aside  and 
ceased  to  think  about  it,  except  in  so  far  as  he 
might  recall  from  time  to  time,  and  more  or  less 
unconsciously,  other  recollections  of  those  early 
days.  Sooner  or  later  he  would  return  to  his 
work  to  make  use  of  memories  he  had  recaptured 
in  the  interval.  After  he  had  harvested  this 
second  crop,  he  again  put  his  work  away,  cer- 
tain that  in  time  he  would  be  able  to  call  back 
other  scenes  and  other  situations.  When  at  last 
he  became  convinced  that  he  had  made  his  profit 
out  of  every  possible  reminiscence,  he  went  over 
what  he  had  written  with  great  care,  adjusting 
the  several  instalments  one  to  the  other,  some- 
times transposing  a  chapter  or  two  and  some- 
times writing  into  the  earlier  chapters  the  neces- 
sary preparation  for  adventures  in  the  later 
265 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

chapters  unforeseen  when  he  was  engaged  on 
the  beginnings  of  the  book.  Thus  he  was  en- 
abled to  bestow  on  the  completed  story  a  more 
obvious  coherence  than  his  haphazard  proce- 
dure would  otherwise  have  attained. 

A  few  years  later,  when  Mark  published 
1  Those  Extraordinary  Twins/  whose  adventures 
had  been  originally  combined  with  those  of 
Pudd'nhead  Wilson,  and  had  been  ejected  there- 
from because  they  retarded  the  main  current  of 
his  narration,  he  confessed  the  disadvantage  of 
his  method: 

A  man  who  is  not  born  with  the  novel-writing  gift 
has  a  troublesome  time  of  it  when  he  tries  to  build  a 
novel.  I  know  this  from  experience.  He  has  no  clear 
idea  of  his  story;  in  fact,  he  has  no  story.  He  merely 
has  some  people  in  his  mind,  and  an  incident  or  two, 
also  a  locality.  He  knows  these  people,  he  knows  the 
selected  locality,  and  he  trusts  that  he  can  plunge  those 
people  into  those  incidents  with  interesting  results. 
So  he  goes  to  work.  To  write  a  novel?  No — that  is 
a  thought  which  comes  later;  in  the  beginning  he  is 
only  proposing  to  tell  a  little  tale;  a  very  little  tale; 
a  six-page  tale.  But  as  it  is  a  tale  he  is  not  acquainted 
with,  and  can  only  find  out  what  it  is  by  listening  as  it 
goes  along  telling  itself,  it  is  more  than  apt  to  go  on 
and  on  and  on  till  it  spreads  itself  into  a  book.  I  know 
about  this,  because  it  has  happened  to  me  so  many 
times. 

When  he  first  told  me  this,  I  ventured  to  re- 
mind him  that  this  composition  at  irregular  in- 
266 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

tervals  had  been  the  method  of  Le  Sage,  whose 
'Gil  Bias/  the  most  popular  of  picaresque  ro- 
mances, was  a  prototype  of  'Huckleberry  Finn/ 
in  so  far  as  it  presented  an  unheroic  hero  who  is 
not  the  chief  actor  in  the  chief  episodes  he  sets 
forth  and  who  is  often  little  more  than  a  re- 
cording spectator,  before  whose  tolerant  eyes  the 
panorama  of  human  vicissitude  is  unrolled. 
And  I  was  not  at  all  surprised  when  Mark 
promptly  assured  me  that  he  had  never  read 
'Gil  Bias';  I  knew  he  was  not  a  bookish  man. 
He  was  intensely  interested  in  all  the  manifes- 
tation of  life,  but  he  had  no  special  fondness  for 
fiction, — an  attitude  not  uncommon  among  men 
of  letters.  He  was  a  constant  reader  of  history 
and  autobiography,  not  caring  overmuch  for 
novels  and  getting  far  more  enjoyment  out  of 
Suetonius  or  Carlyle  than  he  did  out  of  Scott 
or  Thackeray.  Of  course,  he  did  not  need  to 
be  familiar  with  'Gil  Bias'  itself  to  borrow  the 
pattern  which  Le  Sage  had  taken  over  from  the 
Spaniards,  as  this  was  ready  for  his  use  in  the 
writings  of  Smollett  and  Dickens  and  Marryat. 
I  took  occasion  to  tell  Mark  that  at  my  only 
meeting  with  Stevenson,  a  large  part  of  our  two 
hours'  talk  had  been  given  to  'Huckleberry 
Finn';  and  that  I  had  been  delighted  to  find 
Stevenson  holding  as  high  an  opinion  of  this 
masterpiece  of  veracity  as  I  did.  I  recalled  his 
267 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK   TWAIN 

assertion  that  l Huckleberry  Finn'  was  a  better 
piece  of  work  than  'Tom  Sawyer,'  not  only 
because  it  was  richer  in  matter  more  artistically 
presented,  but  also  and  especially  because  it 
had  more  of  the  morality  which  must  ever  be 
the  support  of  the  noblest  fiction.  And  I  also 
told  Mark  how  H.  C.  Bunner  had  confessed  to 
me  that  he  had  never  fully  understood  the 
Southern  attitude  toward  slavery  as  a  peculiar 
institution,  not  to  be  apologized  for  but  rather 
to  be  venerated  as  virtuously  righteous,  until 
he  read  the  record  of  Huck's  long  struggle 
with  himself  to  refrain  from  sending  Jim  back 
into  the  servitude  from  which  he  was  escaping. 
If  the  peculiar  institution  could  so  cramp  the 
kindly  conscience  of  Huck  Finn,  vagabond  and 
son  of  the  town  drunkard,  then  it  was  an  insti- 
tution indeed,  and  it  was  peculiar. 

When  I  thought  over  Mark's  statement  that 
everything  in  'Tom  Sawyer'  and  'Huckleberry 
Finn'  was  taken  straight  from  life,  I  recalled  a 
remark  made  to  me  a  score  of  years  earlier  by 
the  man  who  had  sold  Mark  his  share  in  the 
Buffalo  Express— to  the  effect  that  "Mark  Twain 
had  a  very  good  memory;  and  that's  where  he 
gets  most  of  his  best  stories."  When  I  had 
heard  this,  I  wanted  to  resent  it  as  a  sneer 
against  Mark's  originality.  But  now  I  know 
better.  It  may  have  been  meant  as  a  mean  in- 
268 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

sinuation;  but  nevertheless  it  was  not  far  from 
the  truth.  Mark  was  always  at  his  best  when 
he  had  a  solid  fact  to  deal  with,  an  actual  epi- 
sode of  his  own  boyhood  or  the  experience  of  a 
friend  of  his  youth.  As  he  told  Kipling,  "First 
get  your  facts, — then  you  can  distort  them." 
Mark  took  the  solid  fact  which  may  have  come 
to  him  from  another;  he  made  it  his  own;  and 
he  interpreted  it  with  his  vivifying  imagination. 

In  the  ample  and  admirable  biography  by 
Albert  Bigelow  Paine  we  are  told  the  names  of 
the  friends  who  gave  him  the  raw  material  out 
of  which  Mark  made  the  'Jumping  Frog'  and 
the  tale  of  the '  Blue  Jay '  in  the '  Tramp  Abroad. ' 
When  Professor  William  Lyon  Phelps  wrote  to 
inform  Mark  that  the  explanation  of  Elijah's 
miracle  in  calling  down  fire  from  Heaven  to 
ignite  the  water-soaked  logs  on  the  altar,  put  in 
the  mouth  of  Captain  Hurricane  Jones  in  the 
'Rambling  Notes  of  an  Idle  Excursion/  had 
been  anticipated  by  Sir  Thomas  Browne  in  his 
'Religio  Medici/  Mark  promptly  replied  that  he 
had  got  the  story  from  an  actual  sea-captain, 
Ned  Wakeman.  And  in  'Life  on  the  Missis- 
sippi '  we  can  read  the  bare  account  of  a  South- 
western feud  which  was  to  suggest  the  wonderful 
Shepherdson-Grangerford  affair  in  '  Huckleberry 
Finn.' 

Here  is  the  explanation  of  the  curious  in- 
269 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

equality  we  observe  in  Mark's  work,  and  of  the 
disconcerting  unreality  we  find  in  'Tom  Sawyer 
Abroad'  and  in  'Tom  Sawyer,  Detective.' 
Where  he  lacked  the  support  of  the  solid  fact 
and  had  to  rely  on  his  own  fantastic  invention 
his  whimsicality  was  likely  to  betray  him  disas- 
trously. It  was  said  long  ago  that  "great  poets 
seldom  invent  their  myths";  and  Mark,  who 
was  a  poet  in  his  way,  was  able  to  achieve  the 
most  satisfactory  result  only  when  he  followed 
in  the  footsteps  of  the  great  poets.  Mr.  Paine 
has  told  us  how  Mark  took  down  'A  True 
Story'  from  the  lips  of  its  heroine;  and  he  de- 
clares that  this  provided  the  imaginative  realist 
with  "a  chance  to  exercise  two  of  his  chief  gifts 
— transcription  and  portrayal;  he  was  always 
greater  at  these  things  than  at  invention."  He 
needed  to  have  the  sustaining  solidity  of  the 
concrete  fact,  which  he  could  deal  with  at  will, 
bringing  out  its  humor,  its  latent  beauty  and 
its  human  significance. 

IV 

I  HAVE  already  mentioned  the  startling  effec- 
tiveness of  Mark's  own  delivery  of  the  story  of 
the  'Golden  Arm.'  As  he  was  a  consummate 
craftsman  in  his  use  of  words  when  he  wrote,  so 
he  was  surpassingly  dextrous  in  his  manage- 
270 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

ment  of  his  voice  when  he  told  an  anecdote  or 
when  he  made  a  speech.  The  voice  itself  was 
a  noble  organ,  strong  and  flexible,  deep  and 
rich;  and  he  had  the  power  of  modulating  it  so 
as  to  suggest  the  most  delicate  shades  of  mean- 
ing. There  was  art — and  a  most  carefully  stud- 
ied art — in  his  seemingly  spontaneous  utter- 
ances. He  drawled  along  and  appeared  to  hesi- 
tate for  the  word  he  needed  and  then  to  find  it 
with  unconcealed  satisfaction;  and  thus  he  made 
his  hearers  feel  that  he  was  merely  talking  to 
them  in  a  totally  unpremeditated  way, — and  all 
the  while  what  he  had  to  say  had  been  thought 
out  and  put  into  words,  and  perhaps  even  re- 
hearsed to  himself  that  he  might  be  sure  of  his 
rhythm,  his  emphasis,  and  his  pauses.  His 
method  was  his  own;  and  he  was  its  master.  It 
was  indisputably  individual;  but  I  have  heard 
more  than  one  professional  elocutionist  express 
delighted  admiration  for  it,  devoid  as  it  was  of 
all  their  paraded  devices. 

It  was  because  he  was  an  artist  with  all  an 
artist's  desire  for  perfection,  that  he  prepared 
himself  when  he  knew  he  was  going  to  be  called 
upon.  But  he  did  not  really  require  this  prep- 
aration; and  if  he  was  taken  unawares  he  could 
speak  on  the  spur  of  the  moment,  making  his 
swift  profit  out  of  the  remarks  of  others.  When 
Sir  Sidney  Lee  came  to  New  York,  Andrew 
271 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

Carnegie  gave  him  a  dinner  to  which  a  score  of 
American  men  of  letters  were  invited — and  half- 
a-dozen  of  us  were  summoned  to  stand  and 
deliver.  When  Mark's  turn  came,  he  soared 
aloft  in  whimsical  exaggeration,  casually  drop- 
ping a  reference  to  the  time  when  he  had  lent 
Carnegie  a  million  dollars.  Our  smiling  host 
promptly  interjected:  "That  had  slipt  my  mem- 
ory!" And  Mark  looked  down  on  him  sol- 
emnly, and  retorted,  "Then,  the  next  time,  I'll 
take  a  receipt." 

At  a  luncheon  to  Theodore  Roosevelt  not  long 
after  the  Spanish  War,  the  Colonel  of  the  Rough 
Riders  turned  to  Mark,  in  the  course  of  a  mili- 
tary reminiscence,  and  said,  "As  a  veteran  of 
the  Confederate  Army,  Mr.  Clemens,  you  will 
perhaps  recall  the  condition  of  nervous  excite- 
ment a  man  is  likely  to  be  in  when  he  first  goes 
under  fire?"  And  Mark  instantly  responded, 
"I  know,  Governor,  I  do  indeed!  And  I  have 
the  personal  peculiarity  that  I  can  preserve  that 
condition  all  through  the  engagement !" 

His  humor  could  be  swift  and  direct.  He 
was  not  one  of  those  wits  who  have  to  be  cau- 
tious in  taking  aim;  he  could  fire  at  the  word 
and  the  bullet  sped  straight  to  the  bull's  eye. 
Yet  he  scored  a  miss  now  and  then ;  perhaps  be- 
cause he  failed  to  see  the  target  in  consequence 
of  some  sudden  obscuring  of  his  vision.  He  was 
272 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

acutely  conscious  of  the  lamentable  fiasco  he 
made  in  Boston  when  he  brought  in  the  names 
of  Emerson,  Longfellow  and  Holmes,  all  three 
of  whom  were  benignantly  listening  to  him.  I 
have  earlier  implied  that  his  little  speech  before 
the  curtain  on  the  hundredth  night  of  the 
'Gilded  Age'  was  more  or  less  of  a  disappoint- 
ment to  all  who  heard  it.  And  at  another  the- 
atrical gathering,  at  a  supper  given  by  Augustin 
Daly  and  A.  M.  Palmer  to  Henry  Irving,  Mark 
failed  to  improve  the  occasion;  he  did  not  say 
a  word  about  the  distinguished  guest;  he  actu- 
ally took  for  his  topic  the  long  clam  of  New 
England — and  what  was  worse,  this  inappropri- 
ate offering  was  read  from  manuscript !  I  can- 
not say  now  how  humorous  this  essay  may  have 
been  in  itself;  I  can  only  recall  that  it  did  not 
seem  at  all  funny  to  any  of  those  who  had  joy- 
fully and  hopefully  applauded  when  Mark  first 
rose  to  his  feet. 

In  all  three  of  these  cases  his  discomfiture  was 
due  to  his  failure  to  hit  the  temper  of  his  audi- 
ence. He  did  not  make  contact  with  those 
whose  attention  he  wanted  to  arouse  and  whose 
interest  he  was  striving  to  retain.  This  is  a 
condition  to  which  every  speaker  is  subject;  and 
it  was  a  condition  out  of  which  Mark  was  gen- 
erally able  to  make  his  profit.  I  have  heard 
him  deliver  a  score  of  after-dinner  speeches;  and 

273 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

only  once  or  twice  was  his  intuition  at  fault. 
Nothing  could  have  been  better — that  is  to  say, 
more  characteristic — in  its  matter  or  in  its 
method  than  what  he  said  at  the  dinner  given 
to  him  on  his  seventieth  birthday.  It  had  his 
customary  exaggeration,  of  course,  and  not  a 
little  of  his  humorous  distortion  of  fact.  It  was 
all  about  himself,  which  was  entirely  satisfac- 
tory to  us,  for  he  could  not  but  be  the  topic  of 
every  speech.  It  was  genial  and  friendly;  and 
at  the  end  it  attained  a  graceful  dignity  which 
sat  well  upon  him  as  he  stood  there  facing  us, 
with  his  "good  gray  head  that  all  men  knew." 
He  closed  by  telling  us  there  was  one  satisfac- 
tion in  attaining  the  scriptural  limit  of  years; — 
there  is  no  longer  any  necessity  for  pleading  a 
previous  engagement  when  we  prefer  to  stay  at 
home.  We  need  only  reply,  "Your  invitation 
honors  me  and  pleases  me  because  you  still  keep 
me  in  your  remembrance,  but  I  am  seventy, 
seventy,  and  would  nestle  in  the  chimney  cor- 
ner, and  smoke  my  pipe,  and  read  my  book,  and 
take  my  rest,  wishing  you  well  in  all  affection, 
and  that  when  you  in  your  turn  shall  arrive  at 
pier  No.  70,  you  may  step  aboard  your  waiting 
ship  with  a  reconciled  spirit,  and  lay  your  course 
toward  the  setting  sun  with  a  contented  heart." 
Equally  felicitous — although  in  a  totally  dif- 
ferent vein — was  a  speech  which  he  once  made 

274 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

in  1889  or  1890,  at  the  Fellowcraft  Club,  an 
organization  of  magazine  writers  and  illustrators. 
On  this  occasion  the  club  had  invited  the  best 
known  after-dinner  speakers  of  New  York,  Joseph 
H.  Choate,  and  Chauncey  M.  Depew,  Horace 
Porter  and  Henry  Howland.  Unfortunately  for 
them  the  president  of  the  Fellowcraft,  Richard 
Watson  Gilder,  called  up  Mark  first  of  all; — and 
Mark's  speech  made  it  very  difficult  for  those 
who  had  to  speak  after  him  to  employ  their  cus- 
tomary formulas.  So  far  as  I  know,  Mark 
never  wrote  it  out;  and  it  was  not  reported.  I 
have  tried  to  recapture  it  from  my  memory ;  but 
I  am  without  hope  of  being  able  to  do  more  than 
to  indicate  its  outline,  well  aware  of  my  in- 
ability to  recover  his  exact  words. 

"I  did  not  know  I  was  going  to  be  called  upon 
this  evening  and  you  find  me  wholly  unpre- 
pared. No — that's  the  truth.  But  it  doesn't 
matter.  It  doesn't  matter  at  all,  for  I've  been 
going  to  dinners  and  listening,  and  I  think  I've 
mastered  the  theory  of  the  after-dinner  speech. 
So  now  I'm  ready  at  any  time  to  make  a  speech 
on  any  subject.  I  don't  care  what  it  is.  Pick 
out  one  that  will  suit  you  and  it  will  suit 
me." 

"Do  you  really  mean  that,  Mr.  Clemens?" 
asked  Gilder.  "Are  you  willing  to  let  me  choose 
a  topic  for  you  ? " 

275 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

"That's  just  what  I  do  mean,"  Mark  an- 
swered. 

Gilder  had  John  La  Farge  on  his  right  and 
Augustus  Saint-Gaudens  on  his  left.  He  whis- 
pered to  them  and  then  he  raised  his  voice  and 
said,  "Very  well  then,  Mr.  Clemens,  we'd  like 
to  hear  you  discuss  the  art  of  portrait-painting." 

And  when  the  laughter  had  died  down,  Mark 
began  with  solemn  seriousness.  "Portrait- 
painting  ?  That's  a  good  subject  for  a  speech, 
a  very  good  subject  indeed.  Portrait-painting 
is  an  ancient  and  honorable  art,  and  there  are 
many  interesting  things  to  say  about  it.  Yes, 
it's  an  ancient  and  honorable  art,  altho  I  don't 
really  know  how  ancient  it  is.  I  never  heard 
that  Adam  ever  sat  for  his  portrait  but  maybe 
he  did.  Maybe  he  did,  I  don't  know.  And 
that  reminds  me  that  when  I  was  a  boy  I  knew 
a  man  named  Adam, — Adam  Brown  was  his 
name."  And  then  he  told  a  humorous  story 
about  this  Adam  Brown, — an  anecdote  wholly 
unconnected  with  the  art  of  portrait-painting. 

He  told  it  as  only  he  could  tell  a  story;  and 
then  he  went  on  in  his  meditating  drawl: 
"Maybe  there  never  was  a  portrait  of  Adam. 
Even  if  painting  is  an  ancient  and  honorable 
art,  it  may  not  be  as  ancient  as  that.  And  I 
don't  think  I  ever  saw  a  portrait  of  any  of  those 
old  Hebrews,  or  of  the  Greeks  either.  But  the 
276 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK   TWAIN 

Romans  did  have  portraits,  carved  mostly,  not 
painted.  I've  never  seen  a  painted  portrait  of 
Julius  Caesar,  but  I  can  recall  more  than  one 
statue.  And  speaking  of  Caesar  reminds  me  of 
a  man  I  knew  on  the  Mississippi  who  had  a 
dog  called  Caesar," — whereupon  he  told  another 
story,  equally  unrelated  to  the  art  of  portrait- 
painting. 

"But  when  we  come  down  a  little  later,  we 
do  find  portraits  in  Rome,  portraits  of  the  old 
Popes,"  he  went  on;  "and  in  Germany  we  find 
portraits  of  their  opponents,  Calvin  and  Luther. 
There's  a  portrait  of  Luther  in  one  of  the  gal- 
leries that  lingers  in  my  mind  as  one  of  the  most 
masterly  revelations  of  character  that  I  ever 
saw.  And  speaking  of  Luther,  there  was  a  man 
in  Hartford  who  had  a  cat  called  Luther," — 
and  he  proceeded  to  tell  a  third  story,  quite  inno- 
cent of  any  association  with  his  assigned  theme. 

"And  that's  all  I  know  about  portrait-paint- 
ing," he  concluded.  "At  least,  it's  all  I  have 
time  to  tell  you  this  evening.  It  is  an  ancient 
and  honorable  art;  and  I'm  very  glad  indeed 
that  you  have  given  me  this  opportunity  of 
talking  to  you  about  it." 

And  when  Mark  sat  down,  the  guests  of  the 
club  felt  sorry  for  the  succeeding  speaker,  for 
they  knew  that  the  last  state  of  that  man  was 
worse  than  the  first. 

277 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK   TWAIN 

I  do  not  know  whether  my  indurated  modesty 
ought  to  permit  me  to  record  here  another 
speech  of  Mark's,  which  I  had  personal  reasons 
for  including  among  his  best.  But  it  is  one  of 
the  most  vivid  of  my  memories  of  him;  and  per- 
haps I  have  no  right  to  leave  it  out  of  those 
recollections.  In  the  fall  of  1893  two  score  of 
my  friends  paid  me  the  compliment  of  inviting 
me  to  a  dinner  in  testimony  of  their  friendship. 
Charles  Dudley  Warner  presided,  and  I  had  the 
uncomfortable  delight  of  listening  to  kindly 
words  from  him  and  Howells,  from  Gilder  and 
Stedman,  from  Nicholas  Murray  Butler  and 
H.  C.  Bunner.  Mark  was  almost  the  last  of  the 
speakers,  and  he  began  by  saying  that  "You 
have  praised  this  man  for  a  great  many  things — 
but  you  haven't  praised  him  for  the  most  re- 
markable thing  that  he  has  done." 

That  evoked  the  expected  laughter,  since  it 
had  occurred  to  me  at  any  rate  that  all  the  pos- 
sibilities of  praise  had  already  been  exhausted. 

"No,"  said  Mark.  "You  haven't  praised  him 
for  the  most  remarkable  thing  he  has  done.  He 
has  redeemed  the  awful  and  appalling  name  of 
B-r-a-n-d-e-r," — and  he  drawled  forth  my  name 
in  the  lowest  notes  of  his  wonderful  voice. 
."B-r-a-n-d-e-r, — it  sounds  like  the  mutterings  of 
imprisoned  fiends  in  Hell !  B-r-a-n-d-e-r, — why, 
it  was  months  after  I  knew  him  before  I  dared 
to  breathe  that  name  on  the  Sabbath  day ! " 

278 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

Again  and  once  again  and  yet  again  he  re- 
peated the  dread  name,  expounding  its  dread- 
fulness  with  all  the  multiple  resources  of  his  in- 
exhaustible vocabulary,  and  with  every  repeti- 
tion of  the  horrific  syllables  his  tones  became 
more  cavernous. 

"That's  what  he  has  done.  He  has  redeemed 
the  awful  and  appalling  name  of  Brander,  which 
was  good  only  to  curse  with — and  he  has  made 
it  a  name  to  conjure  with ! " 


AFTER  he  had  followed  the  equator  around 
the  world,  earning  the  money  to  get  himself  out 
of  debt,  Mark  developed  an  abiding  dislike  for 
the  dreariness  of  a  lecture  tour,  with  its  obliga- 
tion to  arrive  at  an  appointed  time  at  an  ap- 
pointed place,  and  to  entertain  a  thousand  lis- 
teners whether  he  felt  in  vein  or  not.  None  the 
less  did  he  keenly  enjoy  talking  on  his  feet  when 
he  was  not  constrained  to  it.  We  all  like  to  do 
that  which  we  know  we  can  do  well;  and  Mark 
could  not  help  knowing  that  he  was  an  accom- 
plished speaker,  to  whom  audiences  always  lis- 
tened with  the  expectation  of  pleasure.  In  the 
course  of  forty  years  he  delivered  many  after- 
dinner  speeches  in  America  and  in  Europe,  and 
he  made  addresses,  more  or  less  informal,  at 
many  meetings  in  behalf  of  good  causes. 
279 


MEMORIES  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

When  I  urged  him  to  gather  the  most  durable 
of  these  into  a  book,  he  wrote  back,  "I  reckon 
it  is  a  good  idea  to  collect  the  speeches."  When 
time  passed  and  the  promised  book  did  not  ap- 
pear, I  repeated  the  suggestion;  and  this  time 
he  answered,  "There  isn't  going  to  be  any  vol- 
ume of  speeches,  because  I  am  too  lazy  to  col- 
lect them  and  revise  them."  But  after  his 
death,  a  volume  of  speeches  was  added  to  his 
complete  works,  a  volume  which  was  not  as 
cautiously  edited  as  it  might  have  been.  The 
selection  was  uncertain;  the  arrangement  was 
casual;  and  the  reporting  was  often  hopelessly 
unsatisfactory.  Not  a  few  of  his  least  worthy 
efforts  were  included;  and  there  were  also  not  a 
few  unfortunate  repetitions.  The  volume  does 
contain,  however,  some  of  the  most  amusing  and 
most  brilliant  of  his  speeches,  printed  either 
from  the  manuscript  which  he  sometimes  wrote 
out  in  advance,  or  from  accurate  short-hand  re- 
ports. 

It  preserves  for  us  the  ill-received  speech  in 
Boston,  that  on  his  seventieth  birthday,  that  on 
the  horrors  of  the  German  language  and  that 
on  the  weather  of  New  England.  But  no  mat- 
ter how  skilfully  the  selection  might  have  been 
made,  the  reader  could  not  get  from  the  pale 
pages  of  a  book  the  color  and  the  glow  that 
Mark  bestowed  upon  his  sentences  by  the  skill 
280 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK   TWAIN 

of  his  own  delivery  and  by  the  compelling 
power  of  his  personality.  Behind  and  beneath 
the  words  which  have  been  preserved  there  was 
the  presence  of  the  man  himself.  Howells  has 
told  us  that  Mark  "held  that  the  actor  doubled 
the  value  of  the  author's  words."  And  those 
who  had  the  pleasure  and  the  privilege  of  listen- 
ing to  anyone  of  these  speeches  will  recognize 
that  Howells  did  not  overstate  the  case,  when 
he  declared  that  Mark  "was  a  great  actor  as 
well  as  a  great  author.  He  was  a  most  consum- 
mate actor,  with  this  difference  from  other 
actors,  that  he  was  the  first  to  know  the  thoughts 
and  invent  the  fancies  to  which  his  voice  and 
action  gave  the  color  of  life.  Representation  is 
the  art  of  other  actors;  his  art  was  creative  as 
well  as  representative." 

If  this  volume  of  his  speeches  had  properly 
been  arranged  in  the  order  of  time,  I  am  in- 
clined to  think  that  it  would  have  revealed  a 
change  in  his  tone  as  he  grew  older.  Even  in 
some  of  the  earlier  addresses,  amid  all  the  exu- 
berance of  his  humorous  exaggeration,  there 
were  to  be  noted,  now  and  then,  passages  of  ex- 
quisite word-painting — like  the  truly  poetic  de- 
scription of  the  ice-storm  in  the  speech  on  the 
weather  of  New  England.  Possibly  these  pas- 
sages surprised  most  of  those  who  heard  them 
and  who  looked  upon  Mark  as  merely  a  fun- 
281 


MEMORIES   OF   MARK   TWAIN 

maker,  not  suspecting  the  depth  of  his  nature, 
his  firmly  controlled  sentiment,  his  sustaining 
seriousness, — and  not  recalling  that  the  richest 
humor,  that  of  Cervantes  and  Moliere,  is  rooted 
in  the  profoundest  melancholy. 

Possibly  again  it  was  Mark's  consciousness 
that  this  was  the  way  he  was  regarded  by  the  un- 
thinking majority  which  led  him  to  say,  more 
than  once  in  the  later  years  of  his  life,  that  he 
had  made  a  mistake  in  coming  before  the  world 
at  first  as  a  humorist,  as  a  man  trying  to  make 
people  laugh.  In  the  beginning  he  may  have 
been  content  with  this  reputation;  but  toward 
the  end  he  was  not.  I  remember  going  into 
The  Players  at  the  lunch-hour,  half-a-dozen 
years  before  he  died,  and  finding  him  at  table. 
(Howells  thinks  that  Mark  did  not  greatly  care 
for  clubs  and  this  may  be  so,  but  I  can  testify 
that  he  was  completely  at  home  in  the  house  in 
Gramercy  Park  and  that  he  relished  its  friendly 
informality.)  He  looked  up  as  I  came  in  and  said, 
"Brander,  I  was  just  thinking  of  you.  I'm  glad 
that  you  and  Howells  have  been  telling  people 
that  I  am  serious.  When  I  make  a  speech  now, 
I  find  that  they  are  a  little  disappointed  if  I 
don't  say  some  things  that  are  serious;  and  that 
just  suits  me, — for  I  have  so  many  serious  things 
I  want  to  say!" 

Many  of  those  who  have  written  about  him 
282 


MEMORIES  OF   MARK  TWAIN 

have  dealt  with  him  solely  as  a  humorist,  over- 
looking the  important  fact  that  a  large  part  of 
his  work  is  not  laughter-provoking  and  not  in- 
tended to  be.  There  is  the  reverent  'Joan  of 
Arc'  for  one  book,  and  there  is  the  pathetic 
'Prince  and  the  Pauper'  for  another.  There  is 
not  much  fun  in  the  account  of  the  appalling 
Shepherdson-Grangerford  feud  in  'Huckleberry 
Finn';  there  is  imagination  and  insight  and 
vision,  but  only  a  little  incidental  humor,  all  the 
more  effective  for  being  only  incidental.  As 
Mark  himself  put  it  in  one  of  the  maxims  of 
Pudd'nhead  Wilson's  new  calendar  which  served 
as  chapter-headings  in  '  Following  the  Equator ' : 
"Everything  human  is  pathetic.  The  secret 
source  of  humor  itself  is  not  joy  but  sorrow. 
There  is  no  humor  in  heaven." 

Many  of  those  who  had  followed  Mark  faith- 
fully were  surprised  and  even  grieved  by  the 
saturnine  misanthropy,  as  it  seemed  to  them, 
which  they  found  in  the  two  books  published 
after  his  death,  the  'Mysterious  Stranger'  and 
'What  is  Man?'  This  could  be  the  case  only 
because  they  had  forgotten  or  failed  to  under- 
stand that  bitter  parable,  the  'Man  who  cor- 
rupted Hadleyburg,'  which  has  a  biting  satire 
not  unlike  Swift's  or  Voltaire's.  And  they  had 
also  paid  no  heed  to  another  maxim  in  'Follow- 
ing the  Equator' — "Pity  is  for  the  living,  envy 
283 


MEMORIES   OF   MARK  TWAIN 

is  for  the  dead."  This  last  of  his  books  of  travel 
was  published  in  1897;  yet  this  maxim  is  only 
a  reiteration  of  others  set  at  the  heads  of  chap- 
ters in  'Pudd'nhead  Wilson'  issued  four  years 
earlier. 

When  I  consider  these  maxims,  I  sometimes 
wonder  whether  we  have  not  here  caught  Mark 
Twain  in  the  act  of  lowering  his  comic  mask  for 
a  moment  to  let  us  have  a  glimpse  of  the  actual 
Samuel  L.  Clemens  when  he  had  come  to  be  a 
little  weary  of  wearing  it  as  a  disguise.  Mark 
Twain  was  a  humorist  beyond  all  question  and 
one  of  the  mightiest  of  humorists;  but  Samuel 
L.  Clemens  was  immitigably  serious  and  in- 
exorably disenchanted.  After  he  had  lost  a 
daughter  and  then  his  adored  wife  and  finally 
another  daughter,  his  outlook  on  life  darkened 
to  barren  blackness;  and  as  he  had  surrendered 
all  hope  of  seeing  them  again  in  another  world, 
the  scheme  of  the  universe  seemed  to  him  un- 
deniably and  inexplicably  futile. 

Howells  has  recorded  his  own  impression  de- 
rived from  the  unbroken  intimacy  of  two  score 
years,  that  Mark  was  a  man  possessing  many 
and  varied  personalities.  How  many  these  per- 
sonalities were  I  do  not  know;  but  two  of 
them  were  present  to  my  eyes  after  I  came  to 
know  him  well.  One  of  them,  of  course,  was 
Mark  Twain,  plain  before  the  gaze  of  all  the 
284 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK   TWAIN 

world;  and  the  other  was  S.  L.  Clemens  with 
hidden  recesses  of  character  unsuspected  even 
by  himself.  Among  his  intimates,  he  was 
simple,  unaffected  and  friendly.  With  casual 
strangers,  he  seemed  sometimes  to  feel  an  obli- 
gation to  play  the  part  of  the  professional  hu- 
morist and,  so  to  speak,  to  act  up  to  the  char- 
acter,— not  descending  to  untoward  jocularity, 
of  course,  yet  none  the  less  yielding  a  little  to 
the  pressure  of  expectancy. 

He  used  to  sign  his  letters  "Mark";  and  he 
let  his  friends  call  him  "Mark";— I  doubt  if 
any  of  those  who  were  admitted  to  comradeship 
with  him  in  his  later  years  would  ever  have 
dreamed  of  addressing  him  as  " Clemens"  and 
still  less  as  "Sam."  His  dignity  was  indisputa- 
ble, despite  all  his  frolicsome  friendliness.  He 
was  kind  enough  to  tell  me  that  he  liked  the 
biographical  introduction  he  had  asked  me  to 
prepare  for  the  uniform  edition  of  his  works 
issued  in  1899;  and  I  suppose  that  he  approved 
of  it  largely  because  I  tried  to  divert  attention 
from  his  drollery,  delightful  as  that  could  be,  to 
his  veracity  as  a  story-teller,  and  to  his  ethical 
integrity — in  other  words  to  the  more  serious 
and  solid  aspects  of  his  work. 


285 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

VI 

HOWEVER  sad  he  might  be  because  of  the 
bludgeoning  of  fate,  he  did  not  wear  his  heart 
upon  his  sleeve.  He  knew  his  life  had  to  be 
lived  out,  whatever  its  inner  emptiness;  and  he 
took  what  comfort  he  could  in  its  more  agreeable 
accidents, — especially  in  the  world-wide  recogni- 
tion of  his  position  as  an  authentic  American,  a 
chief  of  our  literature,  as  peculiar  a  product  of 
our  Western  civilization  as  Franklin  or  Lincoln. 
He  was  too  shrewd  to  overvalue  contemporary 
admiration,  but  he  relished  it  for  what  it  was 
worth.  I  find  among  my  notes  from  him  one 
thanking  me  for  sending  something  I  had  writ- 
ten about  him  and  saying,  "Compliments  are 
sometimes  pretty  hard  to  bear,  but  these  are 
not  of  that  sort;  they  are  conspicuously  and 
most  pleasantly  the  other  way." 

Although  this  note  came  to  me  in  an  envelope, 
it  was  written  on  a  Viennese  correspondence  card 
decorated  with  his  portrait  drawn  by  a  local 
artist.  The  card  itself  was  an  outward  and  visi- 
ble sign  of  the  impression  he  had  made  in  the 
Austrian  capital.  His  fame  had  travelled  be- 
yond the  confines  of  our  language,  from  the 
United  States  to  Great  Britain  and  then  across 
the  English  Channel  to  the  Continent,  spreading 
more  rapidly  among  the  Germans  than  among 
286 


MEMORIES   OF   MARK   TWAIN 

the  French,  naturally  enough.  At  the  end  of 
the  nineteenth  century  he  was  one  of  the  half- 
dozen  men  of  letters  who  had  international 
standing. 

It  was  while  he  was  interned  at  an  unknown 
Austrian  health-resort  that  a  little  group  of  us 
at  The  Players  were  talking  about  him  and 
wondering  where  he  was  and  where  we  could 
send  him  an  expression  of  our  hope  that  he 
would  soon  return  to  us.  I  ventured  the  asser- 
tion that  he  was  then  so  well  known  that  a  let- 
ter would  find  him  if  addressed  simply  to 
"Mark  Twain.  God  knows  where."  Francis 
Wilson  at  once  put  that  direction  on  an  envelope 
and  asked  me  to  send  Mark  our  greetings.  I 
don't  now  recall  just  what  I  wrote,  but  in  less 
than  three  weeks,  I  received  the  reply,  "Well, 
He  did!"  The  post  office  here  had  delivered 
the  letter  to  his  New  York  publishers,  who  had 
transmitted  it  to  his  London  publishers;  and 
they  had  sent  it  to  his  Vienna  bankers,  so  that 
it  came  into  his  hands  almost  as  swiftly  as  if 
we  had  been  supplied  with  the  name  of  the 
hotel  where  he  had  hidden  himself. 

A  humorist  is  often  without  honor  in  his  own 
country, — or  at  least  his  own  countrymen  are 
too  completely  in  the  habit  of  laughing  at  his 
writings  to  spare  time  to  spy  out  its  less  obvious 
and  deeper  merits.  In  England,  Stevenson  and 
287 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

Henley,  Rudyard  Kipling  and  Andrew  Lang 
were  not  laggard  in  their  discriminating  praise. 
It  was  an  Englishman,  met  in  a  train  somewhere 
in  Europe,  who  recognized  him  and  who  startled 
him  by  saying  abruptly,  "Mr.  Clemens,  I  would 
give  ten  pounds  not  to  have  read  your  'Huckle- 
berry Finn'!"  And  when  Mark  looked  up  at 
him,  awaiting  an  explanation  of  this  extraordi- 
nary remark,  the  Englishman  smiled  and  added : 
"So  that  I  could  again  have  the  great  pleasure 
of  reading  it  for  the  first  time." 

As  an  illustration  of  the  interstices  in  the 
British  acquaintance  with  names  which  are 
household  words  with  us,  Joseph  H.  Choate  used 
to  tell  of  an  experience  of  his  when  he  was  our 
Ambassador  to  Great  Britain.  He  was  dining 
with  the  dons  of  an  Oxford  college  and  he  hap- 
pened to  speak  of  Daniel  Webster.  He  had  no 
sooner  uttered  the  name,  than  he  perceived  that 
it  meant  nothing  to  these  English  scholars. 
Suddenly  one  of  the  younger  men,  at  the  far 
end  of  the  table,  spoke  up  eagerly.  "Oh,  I 
know  him,  Mr.  Choate.  Wasn't  Daniel  Web- 
ster the  name  of  the  jumping  frog  in  Mark 
Twain's  story?" 

That  was  an  anecdote  which  Mark  himself 

enjoyed,  as  he  enjoyed  the  dinner  given  him  by 

the  staff  of  Punch  in  the  famous  dining-room, 

when  he  crossed  over  to  England  to  be  the  re- 

288 


MEMORIES   OF   MARK  TWAIN 

cipient  of  an  honorary  degree  from  Oxford. 
"  Foreign  nations,"  said  a  clever  young  American 
many  years  ago,  "are  a  kind  of  contemporane- 
ous posterity";  and  when  the  oldest  of  English 
universities  stamped  Mark  with  its  august  ap- 
proval, he  may  well  have  received  this  as  a  pre- 
diction of  the  verdict  of  ensuing  generations. 
Other  men  of  distinction,  among  them  Rudyard 
Kipling,  received  degrees  on  the  same  day;  but 
Mark  was  the  outstanding  figure  in  the  cere- 
mony. He  was  the  one  whom  the  undergrad- 
uates most  rapturously  hailed.  And  I  have  no 
doubt  that  these  manifestations  warmed  Mark's 
heart  and  that  he  revelled  in  being  thus  con- 
spicuously set  apart  from  the  others. 

I  doubt  this  the  less  because  it  was  exactly 
what  he  had  done  a  few  years  earlier  when  he 
received  an  honorary  degree  at  the  Yale  Bicen- 
tenary. On  that  occasion  eight  American  au- 
thors had  conferred  upon  them  the  right  to  put 
Litt.D.  after  their  respective  names.  We  had 
to  walk  in  procession,  two  by  two,  to  the  theater 
where  the  degrees  were  to  be  bestowed.  Mark 
and  Ho  wells  led  off  by  right  of  seniority;  next 
came  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich  and  George  W. 
Cable;  Gilder  and  I  followed  them;  and  Wood- 
row  Wilson  and  Thomas  Nelson  Page  as  the 
youngest  pair  marched  behind  us.  We  were 
four  couples,  but  to  the  crowds  that  lined  the 
289 


MEMORIES   OF   MARK  TWAIN 

streets  seven  of  us  vanished  and  became  invisi- 
ble as  soon  as  the  spectators  caught  sight  of 
Mark.  They  applauded,  they  laughed,  they 
shouted  his  name,  they  cheered;  and  Mark  took 
it  all  to  himself  very  much  as  if  he  were  a  King 
entering  his  capital  for  the  first  time,  and  bow- 
ing graciously  now  to  the  right  and  then  to 
the  left.  Howells  and  Cable,  Gilder  and  I,  all 
old  friends  of  his,  enjoyed  his  enjoyment  and 
accepted  our  own  obscuration  as  the  most  nat- 
ural thing  in  the  world.  But  I  have  wondered 
whether  the  others,  not  so  fond  of  Mark  as  we 
were,  were  as  readily  reconciled  to  their  elimi- 
nation from  the  consciousness  of  the  throngs 
that  lined  the  streets  of  New  Haven. 


VII 

ONE  reason  why  'Tom  Sawyer*  and  ' Huckle- 
berry Finn'  are  to  be  ranked  among  the  best  of 
boys'  books  is  because  Mark  had  the  rare  gift 
of  recovering  the  spirit  of  boyhood,  with  its 
eagerness  and  its  assurance,  its  exuberant  energy 
and  its  incessant  desire  to  assert  individuality, — 
in  other  words,  to  "show  off."  Until  his  dying 
day  Mark  retained  the  essentials  of  boyishness. 
It  might  almost  be  said  that  he  never  grew  up. 
He  had  the  effervescent  irresponsibility  of  a 
boy,  the  impulsive  recklessness,  which  accounted 
290 


MEMORIES   OF   MARK   TWAIN 

for  his  risking  his  money  in  a  rash  succession  of 
inventions.  It  is  not  to  be  wondered  at  that 
the  name  given  him  by  the  one  who  knew  him 
best,  his  wife,  was  "Youth." 

Perhaps  'Tom  Sawyer'  is  only  a  little  more 
autobiographic  than  '  David  CopperfiekT  and 
'Pendennis.'  As  Mark  himself  told  me,  more 
things  happened  to  the  hero  than  ever  happened 
to  the  author.  But  there  is  passage  after  pas- 
sage in  the  juvenile  narrative  where  we  can  feel 
assured  that  Mark  was  drawing  on  his  own 
store  of  memories;  and  there  is  one  in  particu- 
lar, which  discloses  a  characteristic  of  Tom's 
that  was  also  a  characteristic  of  Mark's, — as  it 
possibly  is  a  characteristic  of  the  normal  boy. 
This  is  the  analysis  of  Tom's  emotions  when  he 
went  to  church,  the  day  after  he  had  let  the 
contract  for  whitewashing  the  fence.  In  accord 
with  his  usual  custom  Tom  counted  the  pages 
of  the  sermon  as  the  minister  turned  them,  one 
by  one.  Then  his  attention  was  arrested,  for  a 
little  while,  by  what  the  preacher  was  saying : 

The  minister  made  a  grand  and  moving  picture  of 
the  assembling  together  of  the  world's  hosts  at  the 
millennium,  when  the  lion  and  the  lamb  should  lie  down 
together  and  a  little  child  should  lead  them.  But  the 
pathos,  the  lesson,  the  moral  of  the  great  spectacle 
were  lost  upon  the  boy;  he  thought  only  of  the  con- 
spicuousness  of  the  principal  character  before  the  on- 

291 


MEMORIES    OF   MARK   TWAIN 

looking  nations;  his  face  lit  with  the  thought,  and  he 
said  to  himself  that  he  wished  he  could  be  that  child, 
if  it  was  a  tame  lion. 

When  Mark  penned  that  last  sentence  he  had 
looked  into  his  own  heart.  He  appreciated  the 
honor  Oxford  had  done  him  in  making  him  a  doc- 
tor of  letters,  but  he  got  a  more  pervasive  satis- 
faction out  of  the  flaming  scarlet  gown  which 
was  the  badge  of  this  distinction.  He  wore  it  as 
often  as  he  could,  and  he  said  he  would  like  to 
wear  it  always.  No  doubt,  he  delighted  in  the 
richness  of  its  glowing  color,  but  he  delighted 
even  more  in  the  showiness  of  it.  For  a  similar 
reason  he  invented  the  white  suit  which  he 
donned  late  in  life  and  which  accentuated  the 
conspicuousness  of  his  shock  of  white  hair,  bris- 
tling untamed  above  his  penetrating  eyes. 
When  he  robed  himself  thus  in  burning  red  or 
in  snowy  white,  he  was  a  boy  again,  he  was 
Tom  Sawyer,  projecting  himself  into  the  very 
center  of  the  millennium.  And  when  Mark  was 
thus  clothed  he  did  not  care  whether  it  was  a 
tame  lion  or  not,  for  he  was  well  aware  that  he 
was  a  lion  himself  and  that  all  men  knew  it. 

Mark  had  been  one  of  the  seven  men,  leaders 
of  the  several  arts,  who  were  chosen  by  a  bal- 
lot of  the  National  Institute  of  Arts  and  Let- 
ters to  be  the  founders  of  the  American  Acad- 
emy of  Arts  and  Letters;  and  after  his  death 
292 


MEMORIES   OF  MARK  TWAIN 

the  two  societies  held  a  memorial  meeting,  over 
which  Howells  presided  and  at  which  commem- 
orative addresses  were  made  by  Choate,  Twitch- 
ell,  Cable  and  three  or  four  other  men  drawn 
from  all  quarters  of  the  United  States.  In  his 
opening  remarks  as  President  of  the  Academy, 
Howells  ventured  to  suggest  what  Mark  himself 
would  probably  have  said  if  his  opinion  could 
have  been  asked  as  to  the  nature  of  the  exercises 
that  evening.  And  so  delicate  was  Howells's 
understanding  of  his  friend's  mind  and  mood, 
that  we  could  almost  hear  Mark  himself  utter- 
ing the  words  with  which  he  was  credited: 

\Vhy,  of  course,  you  mustn't  make  a  solemnity  of 
it;  you  mustn't  have  it  that  sort  of  obsequy.  I  should 
want  you  to  be  serious  about  me — that  is,  sincere; 
but  not  too  serious,  for  fear  that  you  should  not  be 
sincere  enough.  We  don't  object  here  to  any  man's 
affections;  we  like  to  be  honored,  but  not  honored  too 
much.  If  any  of  you  can  remember  some  creditable 
thing  about  me,  I  shouldn't  mind  his  telling  it,  pro- 
vided always  he  didn't  blink  the  palliating  circum- 
stances, the  mitigating  motives,  the  selfish  considera- 
tions that  accompany  every  noble  action.  I  shouldn't 
like  to  be  made  out  a  miracle  of  humor,  either,  and  left 
a  stumbling  block  for  anyone  who  was  intending  to  be 
moderately  amusing  and  instructive  hereafter.  At  the 
same  time,  I  don't  suppose  that  a  commemoration  is 
exactly  the  occasion  for  dwelling  on  a  man's  short- 
comings in  his  life  or  his  literature,  or  for  realizing  that 
he  has  entered  on  an  immortality  of  oblivion. 

293 


MEMORIES    OF   MARK   TWAIN 

As  I  listened  to  Howells  and  to  the  half-dozen 
others  who  spoke  after  him,  and  as  I  felt  the 
warmth  of  friendly  feeling  and  of  comradely 
appreciation,  I  wished  that  Mark  might  have 
had  the  privilege  he  gave  Tom  Sawyer  and  that 
he  could  have  returned  to  life  to  be  present  at 
his  own  funeral  exercises. 

What  was  said  by  the  successive  speakers  was 
serious  enough  and  yet  not  too  serious  for  sin- 
cerity; and  I  perfectly  understood  what  Howells 
meant  when  he  wrote  me  a  day  or  two  later 
that  he  felt  sure  "  Mark  would  have  enjoyed  it ! " 

(1919.) 


294 


BIBLIOGRAPHIC  NOTE 

Other  papers  by  the  same  writer  on  kindred  topics 
will  be  found  in  other  volumes. 

In  'Pen  and  Ink:  Essays  on  Subjects  of  More  or  Less 

Importance'  (1888)  there  are  papers  on  the 
'Antiquity  of  Jests/  the  'Ethics  of  Plagiarism/  and 

the  'True  Theory  of  the  Preface.' 
In  the  'Historical  Novel  and  Other  Essays'  (1901) 

there  are  papers  on 
'Romance  Against  Romanticism/  and  on  'Literature 

as  a  Profession.' 
In  'Inquiries  and  Opinions'  (1907)  there  are  papers 

on  the 

'Supreme  Leaders/  and  'An  Apology  for  Technic.' 
In  the  'American  of  the  Future  and  Other  Essays' 

(1909)  there  are  papers  on 

'American  Character/  on  'American  Manners/  on 
'American   Humor/   and   on   'Reform  and  Re- 
formers.' 
In  'Gateways  to  Literature  and  Other  Essays'  (1912) 

there  are  papers  on  the 

'Economic  Interpretation  of  Literary  History/  on 
the  'Duty  of  Imitation/  on  the  'Devil's  Advocate/ 
and  'In  Behalf  of  the  General  Reader.' 


295 


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